Ten Books That Mattered: Part Five (Humblings)

1. C.S. Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia
2. Sue Townsend - The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 1/3
3. Stephen King - Carrie
4. Blake Nelson - Girl
5. Anaïs Nin - Incest
6. Dorothy Herrmann - Helen Keller: A Life
7. David Foster Wallace - Oblivion
8. Edna O'Brien - The Light of Evening
9. John D'Agata & Jim Fingal - The Lifespan of a Fact
10. Lidia Yuknavitch - The Chronology of Water

A few years ago, my mentor, giving one of her lovely, lazy-Susan-like lectures, explained that when she first read Moby-Dick at a young age, she decided she would never write another word. She despaired of ever writing anything as good as Moby-Dick and thought it would be better not to write at all. Of course, she went back on this decision, and - having read her work - I can tell you that we're all richer for her change of heart.

Some time later, in another class, she re-told this story, and I told her that I'd read Moby-Dick since the last time I heard it, almost entirely because of this story: I didn't want to miss a book so extraordinary that it made her feel incapable of writing well.

"And what'd you think?" she said. "Pretty good, right?"

"Yeah, pretty good," I answered. We chuckled over the understatement.

A Feminist Argument in Favor of Reading Infinite Jest

Some weeks ago, I read this article, and I got into a conversation with my friend Marissa about it. Marissa is one of my favorite people for too many reasons to list here, but here are two relevant to this post: she is an exuberant feminist and a beautiful reader. These things combine to make her spurn books by men in a way I admire. She can correct this memory if I've screwed it up, but I think it happened that she spent a year reading books only by women, and then when she finished the year and started a book by a man, it reminded her of all the crappy qualities of male writers and the reasons why she did the project in the first place. She metaphorically (or literally?) tossed it at the wall and went back to solely women writers.

(A number of other writers have done this year-long project. The article I remembered best about it was this one on (cringe) XOJane, but you can also find work about it on Flavorwire, Medium, and elsewhere. Some of the articles, like this one on the Post, even include helpful lists of women's books, because Lord knows no one can independently find women writers, hidden as they are behind vacuum cleaners and under changing tables.)

Marissa and I had a Facebook conversation about this article* on DFW, joined by other women who've experienced the same phenomenon of Men Recommending DFW. It got sort of philosophical, running to the question of why people recommend things to other people in the first place. How to distinguish between recommending as condescension and recommending as genuine interest and exchange?

The main question I wanted to ask was why not having read something must be linked to insecurity. I'm not trying to accuse the writer, but what I mean is -

I wanted to become the right kind of person: savvy, culturally literate, respected by the metropolitan elite that might assume by default the cultural illiteracy of someone from Virginia. For a long time, I’d respond to men’s Wallace recommendations with “he’s on my list,” or “I’ve been meaning to — totally.” And for a long time, I meant it. 

Why not just say "No, I haven't" without assuring the asker that you intend to? It might be because you want to keep the conversation moving smoothly, which is completely reasonable. But it reads to me as "Oh, yes, I recognize that he's Important and I fully intend to comply with society's expectation that I read him."

This is how you become the right kind of person: if you’re not in a position of power, identify your oppressors — well-intentioned, oblivious, or otherwise — and love their art. This is why it’s hard to distinguish my reaction to Wallace from my reaction to patriarchy. This insistence that I read his work feels like yet another insistence that The Thing That’s Good Is The Thing Men Like. 

Of course, I know female DFW fans. But when women have talked to me about Wallace, their commentary is usually “he’s funny,” or “I liked A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” It has never been “Go read Infinite Jest,” or “You haven’t read any of his work?” It should also be noted that, upon hearing about this essay, male Wallace fans have specifically listed women they know who like Wallace — as if this invalidates my disinterest somehow. 

So, okay. This is all fair and true and real. Coyle is right on the money when she talks about The Thing That's Good and the kind of person who generally tends to like/recommend DFW (white, male, pretentious, self-centered).** But I still don't understand why the answer isn't merely "No, I haven't read him." I mean, who cares? Why try to be the right kind of person? Why fall into resisting male insistence? No one wins that way. The resister looks passive-aggressive and the insister looks like a dick.

Moreover, why not reply with asking if the recommender has read Elena Ferrante? Or Zadie Smith? Or Clarice Lispector? Why is the response "Of course I'll correct this oversight" instead of "Hey, so there's literature in the world not written by men"? The latter might lead to an interesting conversation, or at least one where you get the measure of who's talking to you and why they're recommending DFW. Anyone who would say "You haven't read any of his work?" isn't particularly someone I want to talk to about books.

One of the main points of Coyle's article (as should be obvious from the quotes above) is the sense that gender divides contribute significantly to who recommends DFW.

The men in my life who love Wallace also love legions of stylistically similar male writers I’m not interested in (Pynchon, DeLillo, Barth). I began checking out of literary conversations with them altogether. Now, when getting into book discussions with a certain kind of man, I often say “I can’t read” as soon as possible. 

I genuinely love that answer. From now on, if someone says "You've never read any of his work?" about Philip Roth, I'll definitely say I can't read. But part of what I resist about Coyle's point of view is electing to shut down irritating DFW recommenders by...not reading his work. What I usually do with an annoyingly omnipresent writer is read his work, and then explain why I don't like him to people who ask. Knowledge is power, y'know, whether in the classroom or at a cocktail party. Being able to stand next to the most obnoxiously erudite person in the room and talk about DFW is, in my opinion, better than saying I can't read. If only slightly. 

As I wrote in that Facebook conversation: read Wallace and make up your own mind. Don't let DFW fanboys tell you what they think forever; tell them what you think.

Doing that requires you to read an awful lot,*** because the target for pretentious people is constantly shifting. But I think it's possible not to be forever saying "He's on my list," between a combination of reading a lot and not giving a damn about whether you've read this or that book. If you care about whether you've read it or not, read it. If you don't, don't. (I mean, why is this so hard that we write feminist essays about it?!) I won't let people talk down to me about books, because I've read a lot of them, and not having read a particular book probably means I've read a different one instead.

Plus, it turns out that a lot of people are faking their knowledge.**** The women in this Facebook conversation noted that most copies of Infinite Jest go unread by their purchasers; pretentious dudes don't often have the discipline to actually get through 1,000 pages of dense intellectual trickery. I, however, have read it. Which means I can keep up a conversation about DFW if you start one and I will know if you're pretending you've read it. Knowledge = power.

And look, I'm not saying Coyle should give in and read DFW like the patriarchy wants her to, but instead to choose reading him as the most powerful option. Don't let them teach you how to use a table saw, or (more accurately) talk to you about how useful the saw could be if only you could get your tiny woman-brain around the challenge of its operation. Read the manual and use it yourself.

Don't let them devalue your opinion, love. Read and speak some more.
Their ignorance shouldn't infect you.

Marissa pointed out that the way Men Recommending DFW see the person/woman they're recommending it to is as "an empty vessel waiting to be filled with male intellect". Ugh. Probably. So turn that around. Read more books than anyone in the room. Have an opinion. Don't let anyone make you feel small because you never got around to Jude the Obscure. Read Middlemarch instead and talk about Victorian realism vs. the waning influence of minimalism, and how since postmodernism we've strayed from the genuine novel form into a kind of extended short story, and how you can see this if you read Sophie's Choice against something like 11/22/63. Those ideas are free from me to you. Enjoy them.

The rest of this post is just extended footnotes, because of course it is.

----

*I'm annoyed that Coyle (or her editor) picked Brief Interviews with Hideous Men to read for the article, because I think it's the least intellectually interesting of his work I've read. He's so mean in it, so heartless, an empty center where the humanism of many of his other works goes. The title says it all: the book is a series of experiments in depravity, rather than in transcendence, which is how I see some of his other work. He's unkind in other stuff, too - the state fair essay, and the essay on porn - but I barely enjoyed Brief Interviews. I'd've picked "Mister Squishy" or just Oblivion to give you a real idea of him. But then I guess Brief Interviews is the most hostile and pretentious Wallace gets, which might be the Wallace fanboys like best. Yuck. 

**It bothers me so much that these are Wallace's strongest recommenders. It's like Richard Wagner: he'll never get the taint of Hitler off of him, even though his art has no meaningful connection with Nazism. 

It has become clear to me over time that everyone who loves Wallace loves him for completely different reasons. The people who are most vocal about loving him seem to love him for the worst reasons: because they think they're as smart as him (or they want to be); because they find his superiority towering instead of hollow, as he eventually did; and because he writes about the minefield of self-awareness, by which sensitive people both male and female, both wonderful and dreadful, are consumed. (The dreadful ones just talk about it a lot more.) I love him because of his excavation of that minefield, and because he likes words more than any writer I've ever read, and because he can write in approximately 6,874 modes, which is 6,873 more than most writers. Among other reasons. But the smart is much less interesting to me than the heart in his work. Fanboys seem to have it turned the other way. 

***I've written elsewhere about the benefits of omnivoracious reading: here, re: YA, and here, re: motivation for reading fancy books. I suspect I'll be writing about this topic in one way or another for the rest of my life. 

****I was COMPLETELY HORRIFIED by this Buzzfeed list and others like it. Why would you pretend to have read anything? It's just going to get you into trouble when people ask what you think! But it cuts both ways. People apparently lie about the books they've read all the time, so you've got the edge if you really do read them. (I've read 15 of those 22.) 

Ten Books that Mattered: Prologue

In 2014, I got tagged in a "ten books that mattered to you" meme. I spent a while putting this list together, and have continued referencing and revisiting it ever since. Although there are many runners-up (Absalom, Absalom!, The Open Curtain, Inside Scientology), and although I've read some necessary-to-my-life-and-brain books since 2014 (The Argonauts, I am not Jackson Pollock, Moby-Dick), these still stand as the ten most important, most impactful books I've read.

1. C.S. Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia
2. Sue Townsend - The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 1/3
3. Stephen King - Carrie
4. Blake Nelson - Girl
5. Anais Nin - Incest
6. Dorothy Herrmann - Helen Keller: A Life
7. David Foster Wallace - Oblivion
8. Edna O'Brien - The Light of Evening
9. John D'Agata & Jim Fingal - The Lifespan of a Fact
10. Lidia Yuknavitch - The Chronology of Water

These are all by white people, sadly. Five are by men and five are by women. Six are fiction and four are not. Six are by Americans, three are by UK writers (two British, one Irish), and I could not find out much of anything about Dorothy Herrmann, unless she's Bernard Herrmann's daughter as well as the author of the Keller book, in which case she too is American.

I thought I might, for the next several weeks, write intermittent posts about why these books matter so much to me. I don't know if I'll go one by one or not, because some of these books were important for clear-cut reasons that don't require much analysis. Maybe I'll lump a couple together.

Oh, and there's one that towers over all the rest: Hamlet. But it's not a book, it's a play, and I think of it as a kind of river flowing under my reading constantly. And its importance is both more ordinary and more subjective than the rest of these. Hamlet matters to me because of 1) its music and 2) what it demonstrated to me about making art. Those aren't reasons for me to recommend it; those are reasons 1) to love it and 2) to teach it.

I could teach some of these ten, but others would be hard. The same poem read aloud by 20 people is going to sound terrible in some percentage of those voices, and that average applied to some of these books would wound me. Hamlet, though, can take whatever you throw at it, and it will keep swinging, as it has for 400 years.

Anyway, look for these posts coming up if you like it when I talk about books. That's a big if, I realize.

Missing Scenes

Over the weekend, I wrote a scene between two characters, a revelation scene, that I intended to be the centerpiece of the second-to-last chapter of the secret project. As I'm nearing the end, I feel the need to tell all the secrets I've been keeping for ten chapters, hence these revelations.

I was dissatisfied with what I'd written. In an intense but vague way. It was like indigestion - an unease in the gut, something not sitting right as it works its way through your plumbing.

I compared the scene with an earlier dialogue scene with which I'm far more satisfied. The differences were myriad: ages of the characters, positions of power held by each, what was at stake for each, relation between them, content of the discussion, I could go on and on. The scenes had very little in common. Mostly, though, one was good and one was not. I kept poking at them with sticks until I figured out why.

These are notes Virginia Woolf wrote and drew for her novel To the Lighthouse.

I got this from the fascinating website Woolf Online, which has a huge cache of archival materials about To the Lighthouse - original notebooks that have been both scanned and transcribed, page proofs corrected by Woolf, letters written to and from her about the novel, etc. Check it out.
If you can't read the above, it says "All character - not a view of the world. Two blocks joined by a corridor."

The novel is divided into three sections. The first and third take place over short periods of time, a day or so, but explore in enormous depth what is going on inside and between the characters. Each of these days is of no special consequence to any of the characters - not the day everything changed for them, not the day they learned what it is to be a woman, etc. Just a fairly regular day. The middle section, "Time Passes," takes place over a much longer period of time, 10 or 15 years, I think, but it's only 17 pages long in my edition, and that's because Woolf doesn't go very deep on anything during that time. She instead summarizes with remarkable brevity the major events that occur over that span: births, deaths, marriages, World War I. In between she describes the gradual decay of a summer house et al.

She's up to a lot of different things in "Time Passes," a lot, but I think I figured out one of the reasons she structured the book this way. As readers, we learn a lot more about the characters, and are ironically a great deal less bored, by the little stuff, the days of no consequence that pass in a family life, than we are by the big turning-point moments that matter so much to a character's makeup.

Reading scenes of large, important emotional events is not terribly interesting at this point in literary history. Most people react to a revelation with surprise. They react to loss with grief. They react to danger with fear, and potentially with bravery or cowardice. These reactions do not take imagination to write, nor do the scenes themselves. Twenty-first century audiences have seen and read these scenes everywhere, in old books and movies and in bad TV. Contemporary literature does not need me to write a scene where a woman tells a girl that she has to sacrifice herself to save her best friend; in itself, this situation may not be cliched, but the things that the woman and the girl say to each other during this scene absolutely are. I was bored writing it, which means people will be very bored reading it.

This scene is a key point of drama for certain of the characters in my book, so it has to exist. But the question I began to ask myself as I was thinking about To the Lighthouse, the $64,000 question that may lead to much, much, much better writing: does it have to exist in the book?

Infinite Jest had missing scenes like this, moments the characters kept thinking about or referring to but which were not included in full scene form in the novel. Some of them I kept waiting to read, because I presumed all things of import would be included in an 1,100-page novel, but they never appeared. And I think it's because those scenes were fairly easy for the reader to imagine for herself and would have been uninteresting for Wallace to write.

Woolf, too, decided to dispense with the big stuff in mere phrases and parentheses, and stuck with the little stuff for the main body of the novel. She knew what we already knew about the world, and she knew what she could show us afresh.

What is included and what is not included - but not left out. Discretion that jazz musicians must understand before they can really play. Choices that true craftsmen of short stories comprehend. Judgment that I suspect can be the codex for making a novel that's a work of art, rather than a novel that's merely good to read.

Events in fiction don't have to happen more than once to be what a professor of mine terms "repeated events", which "occur once, but are narrated multiple times throughout the story." Hamlet refers to his father's murder over and over and over and OVER again. Stephen Dedalus's mother's death haunts several chapters of Ulysses (usually with the very same sentences). It's the same little scratch on the roof of your mouth that your tongue keeps returning to, unbidden, but it has a different sensation on day one than it has on day four. The same death, but different reactions, depending on Stephen's surrounding company and the strength of Hamlet's metaphorical sword arm.

So even though this revelatory conversation has to occur, has to keep being considered by the characters, I don't necessarily have to write the conversation into the book. The characters know it exists, and readers of the characters therefore cannot miss its existence. What exact words passed between the characters in that room on that day is not of much importance, because the reader can imagine them and possibly a great deal more than I could put in her head directly.

How useful this is! What I can put in place of these scenes are scenes that have not been read and seen hundreds of times by a postmillennial audience. Matt said this sounded like an interesting challenge, alluding to a crucial moment well enough for the reader to imagine it rather than just writing it, and I agree. But, for once, such a challenge fills me with happy anticipation instead of terror. Even though it will be hard, I'm not stuck writing boring scenes I don't want to write. And it's all hard, anyway. No writer gets a pass on hard.

The Impossible Book

Previously on The Fictator:

But what's helpful about what Joyce and DFW and Wagner definitely have in common is the data associated with them - the small output, the unlimited unpacking that can be done to their art, the difficulty in creating with which they coped.

I have more to say about DFW and Joyce, specifically about their respective final books, but as I was putting that post together I realized I was trying to express two different ideas that didn't really go together and making a monster of a post. So here's the other idea.

DFW's last, unfinished novel is called The Pale King. This is also the title of the D.T. Max biography's closing chapter, which takes the reader through Wallace's struggle to write the novel and his final illness. I think Max was nudging the reader to see Wallace himself as a pale king (a comparison that's somewhat lost on me), but it seemed he was also casting the novel as an endeavor that battered Wallace and potentially broke him. Not that Wallace's life would have ended differently if he'd succeeded in writing The Pale King. Not exactly. But that he could not surmount the difficulty of writing the novel, and this made him despair of his art.

Wow, he would have been SO uncomfortable with this image

Joyce, for his part, struggled with Finnegans Wake for seventeen fucking years. (I often joke that I think Finnegans Wake is a hoax, and that Joyce, had he lived a few years longer, would have retracted it and released the real novel instead, i.e. that he was working on two novels at the same time, one real, one fake. I don't really actually think this, because scholars would have found it out by now, but it makes a good joke, right?) I imagine he despaired frequently: in gradually losing his eyesight, in all of his friends deserting him, in trying to harness the intrinsic, animal power of language and idiom - like harnessing the sea. But he finished. His was a different temperament than Wallace's, after all.

I can't claim that these books necessarily have a lot in common, especially since I haven't read either one. But there are threads connecting Wallace's life and work with Joyce's life and work that become eerier and more interesting the more I learn about the two figures. Kind of like the coincidences between the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations. So I puzzle over their final endeavors, and wonder what analysis thereof will illuminate - about each artist, and about the nature of writing the impossible book.

I love Eyepatch Joyce. This sketch is by Djuna Barnes. 

Here is the question that's been nagging at me for weeks: What was it about The Pale King that Wallace could not surmount, that made him fail where Joyce (in some senses) succeeded? Why did that book [maybe] break him? Why did he spend years struggling with it, and decide to give it up, and start it again, and make himself wretched over it? Did perfectionism conquer him? Had novels become the wrong form for him? Was he working on a bad book, and should he have just trunked it and tried something else? Or was he reaching for exactly the book that needed to be written, and was he too impatient or weak or unskilled to write it?

[Not that I think any of those three adjectives apply, at all, to DFW as a writer, but this is where my mind has gone. Was The Pale King really that...big, I guess, that even this virtuoso could not manage it?]

Max says that part of Wallace's effort with his final novel was to write about boredom, which, okay, good luck making that topic into a book people will want to read. Hat: off. I'm not at all sure that the consuming humanism of his later work is a philosophy that lends itself to the same kind of maximalism epitomized by Infinite Jest. So he had a hard row to hoe, absolutely. Joyce, in writing the Wake, seemed to dive headlong into technical and linguistic experimentation, and perhaps (it seems to me, and to some but not all critics) was even reaching for postmodernism. Wallace was reaching past postmodern meaninglessness to see what lay beyond. Do these artistic approaches have anything to do with the two projects, and why one was finished and the other was not?

Maybe the connection is that The Pale King proved unwritable, while, according to a wide majority, the Wake proves unreadable. Maybe if he'd finished King, it would have suffered the same fate as the Wake. But Wallace cared so much more what people thought of his work than Joyce seemed to. Is that why he couldn't finish, and Joyce could?

Or is there actually no parallel here, and I'm analyzing Kennedy/Lincoln coincidences to no useful purpose?

More unanswerable questions, more uncertainty, at the close of a post. Like the end of Wallace's life (and, frankly, the life that came to an end yesterday): too much left unwritten. Too much to bear.

Big Data on Genius

In my single class for this semester, we just finished a unit on Ulysses, one of the great confounders of the 20th century. We did not read the whole book, just portions of it, and it was the second time I'd been through it. I was sort of surprised at how well I remembered the material. I think I've read at least a hundred other books since October of 2013.

Anyway, studying Ulysses reminded me that Joyce's output was actually not that large, comparatively. I mean, Updike and Roth kept/keep cranking out book after book, dozens of them across decades, but the towering talent of Joyce only expressed itself in three novels (one of them largely incomprehensible), a book of short stories, a play, and a smattering of poetry.

I connected this with DFW (because really, what doesn't connect to DFW?), whose stack of books is similarly not-very-tall. Three novels (one unfinished), three books of short stories, three books of essays (one posthumous), two brief nonfiction books that a reader like me, for instance, has no interest in whatsoever, and miscellaneous other work that one day will be collected into an overpriced volume, I guarantee it. This is not a very very small oeuvre (and it's dense as hell, like Joyce's), but again - Philip Roth has written twenty-seven novels. Updike wrote twenty-one, and eighteen books of short stories.

I decided to go exclusively with pictures of Kanye for this post, because, for a post of this theme, who else?

Neither Joyce nor DFW was particularly long-lived, and Updike and Roth were/are certainly that. So that might have something to do with it. But the word that kept appearing in my head as I considered this is genius. Because one of the other guys on my mind was Wagner, who did live a fairly long life but wrote only 13 operas, not nearly as many as Verdi (25+) or Rossini (39). What he did write was the Ring Cycle, which does not need my endorsement to be associated with the word "genius".

In the course of thinking about this, I had a conversation with Matt (get out your Fictator bingo card), and I wish I could remember his exact words, but he said something like: Next Level-genius cannot be sustained; it flares out quickly after giving what it has to give. Look at Mozart, he said. Yeah. Exactly. Large oeuvre in that case, but what a paltry set of years he was granted. Yet even figures like Wagner who lived longer lives evidently only have so much of their genius to give before they've given it all.

I've tried before to set up an argument about the category of genius vs. the everybody-else category, for which I never had a name, and failed. Because there are touches of genius in plenty of art that is not wrought by geniuses. My favorite opera is Les Contes d'Hoffman, which has some genius in it, but isn't Götterdämmerung. The score for Star Wars is a remarkable piece of music, a stirring and spectacular object of art, but is John Williams a genius? I mean, no, I don't think so. He's not Wagner. No one is. No one is James Joyce but James Joyce, and no one ever shall be.

This other category, people who create often-glorious art that makes the world a more profound and fascinating place - but is not Next Level - Matt finally put a name to: craftsmen. Alice Munro is a craftsman. Hitchcock was a craftsman. Verdi was an amazing craftsman. These people don't come and go in too short a season; they crank out work year upon year, melodies you'll hum for the rest of your life, books you’ll buy for half the people you know. There's an enormous spectrum of craftsmen, from the extremely good to the wholly mediocre, but there's only a tiny handful of figures, a one-tenth of one percent, who qualify as geniuses.

At least, that’s my conclusion. The more I think about artists and try to decide whether they fit into one category or the other, the more murky things get. Virginia Woolf? Dave Chappelle? Terrence Malick? I'm not qualified to make these decisions. But what's helpful about what Joyce and DFW and Wagner definitely have in common is the data associated with them - the small output, the unlimited unpacking that can be done to their art, the difficulty in creating with which they coped.

One of the beloved books of my library is The Secret Language of Birthdays, a very silly horoscopey book that offers a two-page spread of insights on each of the 366 possible days to be born. The way the book's writers determined what your personality is like per your birthday is by aggregating the traits of famous people born on each of the days and looking for trends, and then writing a personality profile based on those trends. Like I said, silly. But eerily accurate, most of the time that I've looked people up in it.

This region of mumbo-jumbo is about where I arrive at the genius conclusion. If all these figures have in common is the few vague things I mentioned above - small output, etc. - that's...kinda bullshit. But it nevertheless made sense to me as I was thinking about it last month.

To be clear, it is honorable and fine to be a craftsman. And, I suspect, a lot less risky and unfulfilling. As I said, my favorite opera is Hoffman, not the Ring Cycle. The latter is too much an undertaking, spiritual, emotional, physical, to count as a favorite. The Ring Cycle and Infinite Jest sit outside that category for me, in a special place where I acknowledge the stunning experience of consuming this art, but it just doesn't fit into my conception of "favorite". I think that's part of how I arrived at this genius thing - in making a top ten list of my favorite operas, where do I put the Ring? It doesn't belong in that list. It's somewhere else. It's Next Level.

Let's Justify Solipsistic Literature

A couple of weeks ago, I read an article on Flavorwire by Jonathon Sturgeon, "2014: The Death of the Postmodern Novel and the Rise of Autofiction," and it's been bothering me ever since. I was put off immediately by its first two sentences, which assert that postmodernism is over and no writers are interested in creating in the genre. It goes on to discuss a new, or at least newly named, genre called autofiction, in which writers turn to themselves as subjects, writing novels that aren't exactly novels about the topography of their lives. Not memoir, not exactly roman à clef, these books, like My Struggle, see the world as the writer sees them and they call it fiction.

At least that's what I gather from reading Sturgeon's article. Autofiction is news to me. What it sounds like, honestly, is just narcissism, the aggrandized importance of the self. It is not a trend I welcome.

I like it when I see me

It's pretty cute for me to criticize what I see as a narcissistic turn in contemporary literature here on my blog, subject: me. But I've been bothered for a while by novelists who put on airs (or have airs put on for them) about their genre-bending fictional tendencies when writing about their own barely disguised lives. I am definitely interested in the triangular tension between reality, truth, and fiction (in fact, it's one of my primary concerns as a writer), but from what I've read, these novels aren't standing at the same intersection I am. Really what they seem to be doing is an exercise in very accomplished navel-gazing. Is that so revolutionary? Is that so worthy of all this study and praise?

Sturgeon says that it's not just a conversation between fiction and reality, and that these novels "redistribut[e] the relation between the self and fiction." Mmkay. The central idea is that the self is made up of fictions, stories, that we tell ourselves about ourselves and others from birth to death. Well...yes. That's the nature of the brain, that it is not an indifferent camera. And it's also the twisted magic of the human experience, all the in-betweening and mitigation of reality. It's not magic that needs a mirror of self-importance to be witnessed.

It's possible I'm just stung by this assertion of the death of postmodernism. I think postmodernism is still worthy, and still has new directions in which to develop. Wallace's work is not finished; his endeavor - which I'd argue was welding a humanist approach to the random, teetering sculptures of Pynchonian postmodernism, trying to show that it is possible to live with heart and authenticity in a culture that is fractured and demanding and wholly simulacrafied - not fully laid to rest. So...fuck it? We just throw all that out and read thousands of pages about some Norwegian guy's completely ordinary life instead of trying to say something of worth about the internet?

No, no. I, lover of Proust, should not be so rude to My Struggle when I haven't read it. But I did not need a Flavorwire article to tell me that this culture is veering away from mutual connection and toward the mirror. I guess I just hoped that literature would not take the same path. I had hoped that post-postmodernism, or whatever you call DFW's work, could bleed sincerity through absurdity, could communicate a human core to our merry, tragic, impossibly splintered experience of postmillenial life. Yet, apparently, literature's solution is just to turn a camera on the author, and thence will come all wisdom.

Ugh.

Somewhat related is this review from The New Yorker, which doesn't quite argue but does present the idea that the possibilities of fiction are exhausted. Or at least that getting tired of putting together fictional plots and characters is something that happens to writers. I'm thirty-three, not fifty-three, and I've been writing seriously for only about seven years, not twenty. But I feel, as a knee-jerk reaction, that if you find it too tiresome to put something into fiction which you can sum up in a single conceptual word, something may be wrong with you, not with fiction itself.

Maybe I'm too bourgeois, or haven't spent enough time wearing black berets and smoking, but fiction seems limitless to me. The blandest realism can spawn worthy intellectual pursuit; look at Bovary. As you add elements beyond realism - fantasy, like García Márquez, or odd narrative strategies, like Faulkner, or odd textual strategies, like Joyce, or or or or - you get more moving parts, more to work with. How can all those various add-ons not be enough, in a career so infinitesimal as a human lifespan grants? If an intelligent, thoughtful novelist can find no way to create interesting work other than looking in the mirror, then I think our culture is in a lot more trouble than anyone suspects.

I Mean...You Know What I Mean?

I'm not completely sure I know how to write this post. I've never taken a literary theory course, so my grasp of the concepts herein - especially hermeneutics - is based on clumsy research and hasty in-class explanations from professors. Despite these dangers, the topic has hounded me to create a blog post about itself over the last few weeks, so here we go.

A month ago, in my experimental lit class, our professor introduced the concept of "ostension." My notes say it this way:

the writer (& reader?) is hurled outside of language into a pre-hermeneutic state - the place where you know what something refers to w/o translating it into language (DFW?)

I needed more. I Googled ostension, and found only two results that actually helped instead of muddying things further: the book of the guy, Paul H. Fry, who applied the word to literary theory, and a book called (Re)Writing Craft by Tim Mayers. Much of the latter is available online from Google Books, and this is the relevant passage:

...there still exists a phenomenon called "ostension" in which the act of writing occasionally hurls the writer (and by extension the reader) into an ontologically prehermeneutic realm - a "place" where there is no meaning, only existence.

By "pre-hermeneutic," I think these people are referring to a place where there is no interpretation of language, nor any of the fuzziness and human baggage that interpretation brings to meaning. Instead, there is just an it - an ineffable whatever that really fine writing communicates directly to the reader's brain.

Have I bugged you to read "Good Old Neon" recently?* It's likely my favorite short story, perhaps my second favorite piece of writing altogether, and I think it succeeds at ostension by the time it reaches its conclusion, giving the reader thoughts and feelings that would be too confusing to explain easily in words but that are nevertheless pure and clear. (Although it might just be all the paradoxes piled on each other that create this impression.) Initially, though, the story labors in an obvious way toward clarity, to explication rather than intimation.

Despite my note in class, I think Wallace's goal is not generally ostension, but that his task is using excessive language to make meaning utterly clear to any reader [who owns a dictionary]. I think one of his central concerns is trying, through maximalism, to mitigate the hermeneutics problem - the problem of all those brains, all those varying worldviews, set to the same hunk of language.** So these are kind of two approaches to the same problem: ostension, which creates pre-hermeneutic meaning through weird linguistic/architectural techniques; and maximalism, lurching toward meaning through pages and pages of skilled and seductive overexplanation.

The book we were talking about in class when this ostension thing came up was This Is Not a Novel, an experimental work by David Markson, about whom Wallace himself was quite effusive in the late 1980s. The book creates ostension through parataxis - another term I learned that day which I still haven't quite learned - placing hundreds of factual sentences next to each other in order to create a certain effect. I loved the book, finding that it made me think and feel unique things about death, the human lifespan, coincidence, art, the act of creation, etc. (It was not well-received by everyone in class.) Few of these themes were brought out specifically in the text, but all the unadorned, uninterpreted facts in juxtaposition for 190 pages meant that my mind leapt to these places nonetheless.

Incidentally, you'll get some weird shit if you Google ostension, because it
means completely different things to philosophers and folklorists. 

I recognized something like this feeling from reading Faulkner. I told Matt while we were reading As I Lay Dying in my other class that I found Faulkner maddeningly vague and yet repetitious. He doesn't give you anything like the full picture, but he repeats certain details over and over in varying ways so that you feel like you have a good grip on the situation. Is that ostension? Or is that just...what Faulkner does?

Of course, being that I can hardly recognize ostension as a reader, I doubt I'm capable of bringing it into my work as a writer. It's a high bar. Communicating right to the reader's brain is the whole point, and doing so with technique and language rather than with less expensive tricks, like a cipher protagonist or exotic backdrops, is a nice goal to have in mind for my work. By the year 2026, maybe.


*If you can't make it through "Good Old Neon," here's an article about it that communicates the essentials. I disagree with some of the author's opinions, but it's still really helpful. I feel it necessary to note that the story's continuous waltz with the theme of suicide is probably irrelevant to David Foster Wallace's actual ending of his own life. His illness was well-controlled at the time he wrote the story.

**Although not in all his works. I don't claim to know what he was up to in Infinite Jest, but I think if it was this, it was not a consistent goal for the whole text. Certainly in his nonfiction, though, and later short stories, I recognized this endeavor.


***Do not use me as a source. If you know more about this than I do, please, please, please leave comments correcting me.***

How to Appeal to Millennials: Confuse Them

Of interest to me in school last week and this week was how the students in my American Novels class reacted to Faulkner vs. Hemingway. The class was super quiet during the Hemingway week (The Sun Also Rises) and I thought it was because the class was just quiet and shy, but when we started Faulkner (As I Lay Dying), KABOOM, engagement. Talk talk talk. Most of the 25 of us had something to say. I was extremely surprised, because I was certain if anything they would be quieter and less engaged re: Faulkner than re: Hemingway. Papa is nothing if not direct, and Faulkner is...indirect.

Something I read in the DF Wallace biography a couple of weeks ago might hold the key to this. The author, D.T. Max, noted that younger generations had a much easier time with Infinite Jest than did older ones, and that it was an undergraduate who actually hit upon the reasoning behind that book's odd climaxless structure. Max posited that younger folks who pick up Infinite Jest have actually grown up in the world from which it is assembled - the world of, well, eternal entertainment; the fragmented and difficult and unnarrative world of 100 cable channels and slackerism and, eventually, the internet. So they are more poised to understand (by nature of living rather than by reading Barth and Pynchon) postmodernism or postpostmodernism than people who grew up on the Harold Bloom diet.

By the same token, I think that the cultural and artistic context of early Hemingway may be fading away, irrevocably. While Faulkner did write about a specific time and place, and did make use of cultural referents that are no longer in use, poverty and family issues will likely endure as relatable human problems for centuries to come. I think that means his work will be relevant to more generations than The Sun Also Rises will be. Critically, Faulkner's way of shattering a narrative into tiny pieces and gluing it together is something that the generation under me - actually literally raised on the internet rather than having it enter their lives in their ~ tweens/teens like me - understands possibly better than any generation prior. I love Faulkner even though I don't claim to understand him, and I think that a lot more people my age and younger are willing to read books from that place, rather than getting annoyed and insisting that everything must go from point A to point B in order to be a good experience.

I shared this with an English professor I know, and she went all quiet, which is a sign that I have a really good idea. "That's why my students now get Coriolanus better than my students ten years ago," she said. I admitted that it was Max's idea, not mine, but nevertheless it seemed like an idea that had been borne out by her experience of students over a couple of decades. So, go Max, go Faulkner, go me.

In other news, I finished the story I talked about last time that very same day, doing one of those writing marathons where I feel wrung out and hung over by the end of it and there are books scattered around that I don't remember consulting and I have sort of lost track of what the numbers of hours mean. I.e. is six o'clock dinnertime, or is it midafternoon? Ordinarily, since it's schoolwork, I'd neaten its corners as well as possible very soon after finishing the draft, and then I'd forget about it. But I think this came out pretty okay, so instead I'm doing the work-work thing where I let it ferment for two weeks and then look at it again. I might be totally wrong, it might be good for schoolwork and nothing else, but we'll see. It was fun to play.

If you're interested in grammar, language mechanics, the evolution of internet language, etc., go read this. I'm off.

Take a Look, It's in a Book

A little reading roundup for today.

Because I'm taking a workshop involving him next year, I'm reading some Steve Almond. My reactions to his work are interesting. I finished a book of essays, (Not That You Asked), and enjoyed it in incomplete, patchy ways. Parts of it bugged the hell out of me. I look forward to his fiction next.

I also decided to try a couple of Wallace Stegner books. I read a few of his stories and enjoyed them enormously. I kind of want to read his entire book of collected stories, which is over 500 pages, but there's so much to read for me right now that I don't think I can set aside the time. He seems like an interesting mix of Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver, although with dialogue as sharp and rule-breaking as George Saunders. He's delightful. I want more.

I've never enjoyed reading poetry because I can't get beyond the sensation of drowning in a lack of understanding: a glucky and inevitable losing sensation, like struggling in a tar pit. The only poems that didn't leave me confused were much plainer stuff, like Frost, which I didn't like in a sort of exasperated way, don't pander to me, I'm not eleven years old (even though I didn't understand the stuff that was rated R for adult situations. I am nothing if not huffy about my own possibly nonexistent smarts). The only thing I can figure out when reading poetry is if I like it or not. If it gives me a feeling of "wow" and a shuffled interior, or if it leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth, or if there's just nothing.*

Despite all this, I bought The Dream of a Common Language after reading Wild (an action which I understand a great many readers of Wild took, but it wasn't the first time Adrienne Rich had been recommended to me). I devoured the book in two days and still have no clue what I read. Thus, I moved on, and tried a book of Anne Sexton last week. I've nibbled at it, and my responses swing wildly between the three poles I mentioned earlier. One of the poems I adored and read thrice in a row; one of them I sincerely disliked; some of them leave me with nothing.

One of the curators of this collection also wrote a book about how to interpret modern poetry, and I decided to read it. Why not? Maybe I'll learn something about why I react like this, as if my intellect essentially no longer exists, whenever I read poetry written after about 1950.

Since a day without DFW is evidently a day without oxygen: I also bought This is Water, which is a little hardback book containing Wallace's unbelievable commencement speech to Kenyon in 2005, which I've mentioned enough times in this blog that I see no point in linking to it again. One of the reasons I bought it was to read the whole thing - fiddled with slightly after the actual giving of the address, but not abridged as some online versions are. I knew pretty much how long the essay was, and I knew how much I was paying for the book - eyes open - so I ignored the bad Amazon reviews that said it was a ripoff.

BUT. If you too want this essay to hold in your hand badly enough to buy this book, I tell you, resist the urge. The essay is formatted to be one sentence per page. I didn't care about $10 for an essay you can [mostly] get for free, because I wanted to hold it, but the formatting fucks up the rhythm of Wallace's words very badly, which I think I can get codified into an imprisonable offense if I collect enough petition signatures. And the long version adds some more content, but (I can't believe I'm about to say this) not much of importance. Print out the WSJ version and hang it over your desk instead.

On a related note, this is serious DFW fandom right'yere:

I so don't get everybody's obsession with Pemulis.

A kind soul gave me The Thinker's Thesaurus for my birthday (it was on my wish list). I thought I'd love it, and OMG I TOTALLY LOVE IT. Even if you're not a writer, if you're just a wordnerd, buy this palmary, eximious book.

Ahead of me is Edward St. Aubyn (I really hope I like the Patrick Melrose books as much as I think I will) and Alice Munro. I've read about 1/4 of Dubliners, and am not finding it life-changing or frustrating, which makes me feel like I must be missing something. And I'm careening through Inside Scientology, which is so, so awesome. Stranger than fiction by far, told absolutely straight, and damned compelling.

Finally, and randomly, more than half of the books above would not have been in my orbit without my library. Please use the library. Encourage book circulation without loss of income. Authors will exhort the hell out of you to buy as many books as possible, to support poor starving writers, and I can't disagree with this. But 70% of the books I read are just not appropriate for purchase by me, for one reason or another. And because of the library, I sacrifice nothing. Nothing! Trust and love and believe in your library.

*This is all hilariously ironic because my mom's profession, to which she's devoted, is mostly about interpreting, researching, and teaching poetry, albeit that of several centuries ago. 

The Power of Three

Saturday morning I saw The Master at a matinee. I have watched P.T. Anderson's career with great interest since the turn of the century, and I hoped for more from him than was delivered to me with this one. Tempted as I am to turn this blog into a film rant outlet for me from time to time, it's not really why I write here, so I won't go into the movie in much detail. (Although I went into it at probably too much length after my friend kamper issued a perfectly innocent and general "What did you think?" on his blog. Spoilers there.)

One of the things that's still nagging at me about this movie occurred in the very last few moments. I'm definitely going to misquote this, so I'm sorry. The titular master says to his disciple, "If, in your travels, you discover a way to answer to no master, no master of any kind, will you please let us know of it? Because you will be the first man in the history of the species to do so."*

This got me thinking about the masters to which we all answer. This is more literal for some people than for others: most of us are employed by someone, some of us are tethered to manipulative or tyrannical people, some of us are devoted to a higher power. But it also reminded me of two other messages that have given me profound food for thought in the recent past.

The first chronologically is DFW's. His "This Is Water" has hardly once left my mind since I read it this spring. This link takes you to the abridged version at the WSJ, and this link takes you to the published book version, which I wish I was rich enough to buy for everyone I know. Here are part one and part two of the actual speech given by the actual DFW. It's not as polished as the final version, but it is, after all, the man himself.

I wrote about this speech a little bit previously, tying it to purpose both in life and in writing. But the echoes of his ideas - that there is no genuine atheism, that everyone chooses something to worship, and that choosing unwisely "will eat you alive" - have only gotten louder since that time, and have touched untold segments of my life. They are ideas I've mentally breathed, their essence reaching into the lowest and highest little lobes and crannies of my brain. I have decided to think hard and choose wisely, and, just as he says, it's a daily process. Minute-by-minute, even.

The second is Stephen Colbert. He gave a commencement speech to Northwestern last year, and it's pretty damn good. (I've seen better in terms of organization, but his credentials are improv, not stand-up.) He gave the speech as himself, not his character; it's still funny, but it's not high on satire. The heart of the speech is at the end, when he [mostly] sets aside jokes. If you don't have time to watch the whole thing, go to 15:25 and watch the rest; that's only five minutes.

The you-can't-win-at-life thing is so, so cool. I wish someone had properly explained to me when I was young that adults, who seem to have it all put together, are totally just making shit up from day to day and year to year. I would have been a lot less intimidated about growing up.

The point, though, is that Stephen has this to say:

In my experience, you will truly serve only what you love. Because service is love made visible. If you love friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve your money. And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself, and you will have only yourself. 

I watched this last week and it got me to wondering what I serve. Then, I saw The Master, where nearly the same question was set out. That was the third time this message and question have been presented to me this year. Humans like the number three, is the way Matt put it to me once when I was being highfalutin' about how I style my written sentences, and it did not escape me even as I was sitting there watching the movie that I was hearing this, that this was impacting my personal atmosphere and shaking up the dust, for the third time.

I thought about it for a while and the only proper answers I could come up with to the question of what I serve were "truth", "compassion", and "art". Those are the things I value most deeply, when I really strip away everything else.

"Art" was also the answer I gave to the question of who my master is. This answer has spun off a whole new way of thinking about why I write and what I want to achieve when writing, a way I have barely even approached before. It soothes and calms the impatience and jealousy that have dogged me when I think about what I want to accomplish. Because giving a name to what I worship/my master/what I serve seems far more permanent and less empty than the wish to tot up money and awards, the desire to check those things off the list and to breathe easy about at least I've got that settled. I can't even number the novelists who've said in interviews that publishing a book isn't nearly as satisfying as s/he expected, and that it rid her/him of virtually none of her/his uncertainty. If that's true, is there ever any certainty to be found, even when blessed with financial security and critical praise? (Martha Graham says emphatically no. And I think she'd know.)

If I'm not being too premature, I think this is how you stop writing with the monkey on your back - how you stop worrying about rejection and the whims of the market. You just serve what you love. You step back to the wider, this-is-water view and you think only about the master - in my case, the art. And when you send something out, you hope for the best; you hope that the market serves the work (the art, the master), and also, if possible, the other way around.

Wow. Let's hear it for the power of three, eh?

*(Might as well make a definite misquote artful, right?) 

Which Reminds Me of a Story

Over Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, I wrote a long story, nearly 10,000 words, that fits together some ideas I've been percolating for months or years. Something central and sad that I've noticed about the world and how we behave in it. A story idea I'd had for so long that I'd gotten impatient with myself about having not written it. Smaller observations and ideas, all important to me and nagging from my notes books to be written, that somehow hooked together as I wrote.

I also tore down the wall between fiction and specifics of my own experience, putting my own childhood dresser into my narrator's bedroom and my own opinion of FJ Cruisers into a character's brain. I've always tried to skirt doing this, because I don't want people making assumptions about what's in my head due to what's in my fiction, but it becomes an elaborate problem to be inspired by my own life but to try really hard to disguise it, more tiring than the main issue of writing the story. So I gave up on striking the right balance and just wrote what was there.

I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. I spent about seven hours on the story on Wednesday (after putting in a workday). And I knew there was a good 2,000 words of it that wouldn't stay, that even as I was writing I knew were the wrong words. Probably I'll have to do a lot more difficult work on it. But I think I've really got something here. It's the first time in yonks - if I'm honest, the first time I remember since 2003 - that I've written something setting forth a clear intellectual idea in which I believe. (As opposed to a story idea, that is.)

I fooled with it a bit on Thursday, cutting out a bunch and rewriting a bunch. Trying and failing to sit back in my chair and look at it objectively; hoping before I went to sleep at night that I hadn't been too much influenced by the Wallace stories I've been reading over the last two weeks. I'm going to give it at least a week, preferably two, before I look at it again.

Part of the reason this story feels so different (and it feels like a total sea change) from what I've been writing in the last two or ten years is that, thanks to the Wallace stories, I stopped thinking about standard technique. I watched a video of him reading from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and discovered that the "And but so"-and-similar tic that he uses at the beginning of many sentences sort of runs together into a mush of connective words when it comes out of his mouth. I'd read it as the same disguised formalism that earmarks most of his work, but having now heard it, I wonder if all along he's just imagined he's telling us these stories. As a bard in the king's court.

Hence I gave some thought to how I talk to people, and how I write on this blog, and I realized that I like to give illustrative examples before (and while) I explain how I feel or think about something. (I simultaneously realized that it's probably sort of a bore to talk to me.) This illuminates the manuscript for me - makes it easier to get my point across and adds verity to whatever point it may be. I wondered how this would translate in fiction writing, because I don't do it in fiction writing, and part of the answer is that it translates to a lot of what seems like digressions but are very much not, which for me make a piece of fiction richer (and I know for some people make it obnoxious to read). Another part of the answer is that it feels like exactly how I should have been writing short stories all along.

When I wrote this story, I tried to do two things. I wrote with the central intellectual idea firmly in mind with every single word, with the idea never once leaving my head for any single sentence. And I tried to write it the way I'd tell if it I was one of the characters. I.e. event X happened today, but event X only mattered to me and felt Y way to me because of event Z two weeks ago. And of course I made the effort to hide X and Y and Z in showing, not telling, and the showing came in the form of digressional examples. Which is why the story was almost 10,000 words in its first draft, because there are four stories leaved together and numerous digressions to show and show and show.

Instead of worrying about Omit Needless Words, I just wrote, in the voice I felt suited the character, in the style that felt like a loose pair of jeans, with a great deal of lovely crazy English. Instead of chewing my nails about not being good enough to forget the ever-clanking mechanics that turn today's wheezing literary market, I just wrote, thinking (when I thought about it) that eventually, maybe today or maybe five years from now or maybe twenty years from now, I'd write well enough to find an audience. Instead of nervously donning white gloves and treating this story as the next piece of copper I'd have to shine to perfection, I just wrote. And since I haven't reread this thing yet, I could be wrong, but I'm starting to wonder if (with at least a half-full toolbox, which I think I've got) this is how to do it.

Overintellectualizing is not new to me. And I've wondered kind of faintly whether it's what I've been doing since 2006 or so. But I got it in my head that writing was supposed to be meticulous and difficult and miserable if you were doing it right, and that doing it the way it felt right was going to lead to sloppiness and ignominy and cries from the audience that you didn't know what you were doing. I think it's somewhere in between: after you get the toolbox and get your head right, it's supposed to feel good.

Like sex, come to think of it. But I won't get into that today. 

Never Give Up, Never Surrender

I mentioned some weeks ago that I saw Les Contes d'Hoffmann, an opera by Offenbach, in the theater thanks to the Met summer encore series. The opera is structured in three acts, each of which has a central female role: Olympia, a mechanical doll, Antonia, a melodramatic singer, and Giulietta, a scheming courtesan. There is also a prologue and an epilogue. The main character, Hoffmann, is a poet who fell in love with these three women, and the structure of the opera is that he's telling the stories of these loves to a bar full of drunken Frenchmen. The styles of each act are quite different. The first act is comic and quick-witted; the second is practically a parody of itself, with the weepy diva and her mysterious illness; the third is a sort of supernatural femme fatale story.

The music and the thematic elements of this opera double back on themselves here and there, and there are two characters (chaotic neutral and lawful evil) that appear consistently throughout each of the acts in an odd, novel way. The story, such as it is, rambles off into three completely different directions and you really have no idea where Offenbach is going with all this until he gets there. Some of its ideas seem utterly bizarre for their time to this 21st-century resident. Each of the three central female parts was intended by Offenbach to be sung by the same soprano. (Having seen the opera, I can tell you this is madness. The role of Olympia alone is unbelievably demanding, even though she only has one major aria. (But it's a stunner.))

Plainly, to me, Offenbach wrote this opera exactly as he wanted, without much thought as to who would be able to sing it and who would want to see it. Okay, exhibit one.

Exhibit two is the White Album, which I'm going to admit candidly I have never really liked. I've always thought it lacked discipline and failed at coherency too often to be a successful experiment. Of course there are amazing masterpieces of songs on it which I don't need to name, but the balance of the album, the songs that weren't singles, always dragged it down to unlistenable for me. "Yer Blues" came up on my randomizer the other day, though. I realized that even though my opinion of the White Album as not much fun to listen to probably won't change, it's still an artifact of some of the best musicians on earth operating at the top of their game with a clear intent to push artistic boundaries.

The White Album is legendary for a reason. It does what it wants to do, presents the songs and musicianship exactly as intended by the band. There may have been better bands operating in 1968, but not many, and no one in such a stratosphere of fame forged ahead so deliberately and fearlessly as the Beatles did with that album.

Exhibit three: Infinite Jest. 1,079 pages of unparalleled genius and, I'd argue, unparalleled difficulty, except for probably Ulysses and À la recherche du temps perdu. I can't imagine what it must have been like to write it, but I know what it was like to read it - like being hit in the face with an overwhelmingly brilliant sun for page after page of incredible intention. Exhausting. Punishing. Full of light. Wallace had to know that it was insane to write a book like this, absurdly long and obsessively detailed and jammed with dozens of characters and so full of its own vernacular that it makes the reader live in two worlds for its length. But he wrote it anyway.

These three works epitomize uncompromising art. Each of these creators had a vision for what they wanted their art to be and say and do, and they went forth and created it, without regard for how it would be received in the world.

I've read enough experimental fiction to know that you can have this attitude and wind up with a big ol' mess. The temptation for me when I'm writing is constantly to temper and fiddle until I feel like what I've produced is right for an audience, not just for myself. If I go too far in the direction of uncompromising art, I feel like I'm letting my ego get the better of me, thinking I'm a lot more talented than I am.

Where's the line? How do you be secure enough that you've created a terrific piece of art that suggestions to make it "better" may be interpreted as compromising the art, and you rightly refuse to take them?

I had a very hard time writing this post. I could overindulge on this topic and write paragraphs upon paragraphs about writer insecurity vs. writer arrogance, the demands of the market vs. the demands of art and whether there's any way to balance the two without losing your damn mind, and a question that I find particularly enduring: how you create art that's uncompromising while still creating art that's excellent or even comprehensible. The simple answer is that you're just that good, but that's not enough of an answer for me. What compels people to sit through the first weird act of Les Contes d'Hoffmann or keep on reading after page three of Infinite Jest, other than perverse curiosity? How did those items get accepted in the marketplace - how did some gatekeeper see promise and decide to take a chance on them?

All of this applies to  me only in the most rudimentary way. I have not written Infinite Jest. But I wonder whether the compromises I'm planning for certain pieces of art are entirely the wrong thing to do, whether I'm bowing to the market in ways that lessen the impact and excellence of the art. Whether I should hold out and try to sell what I have, instead of trying to fold it up and fit it in a specific box. Or is it just a big ol' mess, what I have, and I need to tamp it down for it to be good art at all?

One is Silver and the Other Gold

This week I've been caught up with petty drama, saying a drawn-out byyyyyye to Matt (he leaves in, like, 36 hours and won't be back for, at the earliest, another 1008 hours after that), e-mailing back and forth with old friends and miraculous new ones (more about that shortly), and wanting to do nothing else aside from read this book. It's a library book right now but I'm definitely going to buy it sooner or later.

I am troubled by the book, for numerous reasons: 1) it feels like a cash-in on DFW's death, which is irredeemably shitty, if true; 2) it has a stupid deckle edge, and having read a few of them in the last several months, I now officially hate reading deckle-edged books, they feel horrible in my hands; 3) it is edited in such a way that it's very difficult to read, if you ask me, with many stops and starts and notes from the author [interviewer] that you can't tell when they were written, and which sometimes refer to a sort of inner dialogue the author [interviewer] is having with himself and only partially lets you in on; 4) it is dude-tacular, in an unsurprising but sort of depressing way. But it's also jammed with fascinating little paragraphs about DFW, writing, and life in general, and all of that specific and exceptional good outweighs the general issues I have with the book.

Prior to this I read Meghan Daum, like I said I would (and was disappointed by her book in a way that sort of took me aback. I thought she was a lot more like me than she turned out to be, and it felt weirdly like she disdained me, which is impossible since I was reading her previously-created work), and I got about halfway through Edna O'Brien's most recent book of short stories before I had to stop. I got to working full-bore on revising the [non-]horror novel and reading any fiction other than my own would have fucked me up. But I also had to take my mind off of the book so I could sleep, hence the DFW interviewesque book. Which, as I noted, is addicting. So I'll go back to O'Brien after I'm done with the Davids.

Re: new friends. I read an essay on the internet some weeks ago that just blew me away in its awesomeness. It was about a mother who advised her daughter, a new college grad just getting her feet wet in the adult world, to quit a well-paying office job that her daughter truly hated. The job was sucking her soul away, and Mom, although nervous about the economy and whatnot, told her daughter to go on and quit the job, take a barista job, and things would just have to work out from there. I thought this was such exceptional advice--advice that I had to give myself when all the authoritative voices in my head were screaming from the opposite side of the balcony, and I felt sure they were dead dang wrong (and six months in, they certainly have been)--that I wrote her an e-mail and told her thank you for being such a good mom to her daughter, and how much I wished I had an adult like her to have confidence in me.

To my great surprise, she wrote back very rapidly (that day, as I remember), thoughtfully and touchingly, telling me to consider her one of those adults, and to keep her posted on the things that go on for me. I thought it would be stupid to let an opportunity like this one get away and told her that I was planning to flog my book at the writers' conference in April, so if something big happened there, she'd be on the e-mail list. Several more missives went back and forth, and the other day I attached the PDF of my [non-]horror novel to her in an e-mail. I told her it was in beta stage (her (perfect) word, actually) and that I'd love any feedback.

She's the first author I've been significantly in touch with (more than just one e-mail back and forth, I mean) who has an agent and a platform and everything. She's both self-published and traditionally published, and is also a ghostwriter. It's kind of daunting to have a pen pal like this, but I'm finally not too deaf to hear opportunity when it knocks, even if it's a soft knock, so I'm awfully glad I wrote that e-mail.

Another good thing about having done so is that she asked me in her second e-mail to "send me a blurb", and it forced me to actually write a blurb for the horror novel. And I think it's not terrible. Maybe I'll post it here, next time I'm able to actually sit down and pound out a post. On Saturday, perhaps, when the house will be really, really empty, me by my lonesome on the last day of March.

Although "Completism and Infinite Jest" Sounds Like a Decent Thesis

In the same day, I finished episode number 45 of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and page 981 (the last page before ~100 pages of footnotes, which I also read (except for the one about Pemulis's calculus equation, no, sorry, but no)) of Infinite Jest. Marathons, both, and now completed. And not entirely dissimilar, for what it's worth; interesting to consume in tandem. There's a little sadness in my heart for both completions. I'll never watch any Monty Python sketches for the first time again, which is a little sad. And I'm finished with a Big Literary Project - certainly the biggest and most difficult single book I've ever read - which, while frustrating, had moments of great transcendence that I'm sorry to let go of.

My mom asked me if it was good, if I enjoyed it, and I said that I couldn't really answer that. I told Matt that I enjoyed it immensely on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph basis, because the writing is so utterly unlike anything else in its virtuosity. So enjoyable to read Wallace doing that work - like watching Baryshnikov dance, I told Mom. But on the whole, it was a slog, and I won't pretend that it wasn't. I'm not smart enough as to have picked up everything that went on, and I think ultimately I am not smart enough not to be frustrated by the lack of conclusion in the book. I think Wallace had a real intention and purpose in beginning and ending thoroughly in medias res, without starting a story or ending it in a way that makes linear or traditional narrative sense. But I like to read, and I do not like to be a literary critic, and I wanted a conclusion.

See here for some reactions of readers upon reaching the end of Infinite Jest. I identify most strongly with "Ongoing"'s two sentences. I also listened to this half-hour interview with Wallace, done in 1996, about the book, and felt on the whole much more settled about having read it, less of a love-hate rage, after hearing his nice measured articulate voice and foul mouth. Despite the business about having actually structured the book mathematically, to which my reaction was "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?" However, smart as he is (and popular as he apparently is), I found the interviewer intolerable to listen to, and I don't know how he got into radio.

Next on my list is Then We Came to the End, which was a seriously hot book a couple of years ago and which I'm just now getting around to. 50 pages in it's pretty good and lots of fun, and maybe I'm seeing phantoms, but I see some annoying Wallace influence in it - the sort of bunch-of-random-sentences-squashed-into-one-paragraph thing, which I am not really in love with as a style. I thought it would be a relief to read something NOT written by someone brilliant beyond the ordinary realm (sorry, Joshua Ferris, but I hope you know what I mean), and it is, but Edna O'Brien is next, and then Meghan Daum. I'm tired of dudes.

As for my own work, a couple of lovely people got back to me about the Greenland book, and their feedback was helpful. One reader had this very interesting approach to certain aspects of the story, one that I never, ever would have thought of, not if you'd given me a hundred years to sort through potential reader reactions. I wish I could be more specific. Take my word that I was flummoxed and amused.

Also, I think I'm finally ready to stop fucking around and revise the horror book. I bought a red pen especially, and more than one person has agreed to read it. This process is so frustrating, y'all: writing, then revising, then reader one (Matt), then more revising, then additional readers, then hounding them all for feedback, then MORE revising, and then putting together the materials to begin hounding agents/editors, which I'm not even ready to do yet. I find myself wondering (wistfully) how people even wrote good books before the present day, when it was all typewriters and garrets and letters by post.

I read a book last fall that was set in the early 19th century in Britain wherein the main character wrote and then sold an adventure novel. It was all so simple. She wrote it, longhand, exactly as she intended to write it, and when finished, read it through once without doing much of anything to it. Her local bookshop-owner read it, loved it, and sent it to a publisher-friend. With some mild edits, it was printed and published and she received a draft for a few hundred pounds in the mail. *snap* Like that. Now I'm all wrapped up with revisions and platforms and the rules for writing a winning synopsis, and ensuring that I get enough reader feedback to make sense out of my draft, and serious novelists taking four years to write a book, and blaaaaaaaah. Can't it be more simple than this without questioning oneself? Or is it actually better this way, with more committee action and extroversion?

I wanted to write a post relating the experience of reading all six books of the original Dune saga to reading Infinite Jest, but this post just didn't turn out that way. Maybe another time. For those of you who know what's involved: yes, I really did read them all, every page. And it taught me an excellent lesson about being a completist, namely that being a completist just is NOT worth the trouble for certain aspects of life. Which is part of why I may not ever read The Pale King.

You Will Die a Million Deaths

So, I hit a story point in Infinite Jest that's really giving me pause. I'm going to presume those of you out here reading this are either never going to read the book or have read it already (or have started and given up on it (them's statistics I really want to see)), because SPOILERS AHEAD.

A character's talking to another character in a bar. Remy and Kate. Kate has extreme clinical depression, and Remy is legless and has all kinds of weird complicated shit going on around him plot-wise, too much to explain. His wife was born without a skull, which we've known from way back, but here around page 780 he explains how he came to marry a woman born without a skull. (Yes, it's absurd. Just roll with it.) The story is long, but at its essence, Remy was very, very depressed and on the point of suicide when he met his wife, a creature even more pathetic than he, and his mission to love her and care for her became the center of his life. He isn't romantically in love with her (I gather), but he's in love with the purpose in life that she affords him. Throughout the book, we've heard often about his willingness to do various things for the sake of his wife, presuming all along that it was for love of her. But it's really not; she has to stay alive so that his purpose in life stays alive. If she doesn't live, and continue to need him to care for her, then he has no meaning in life.

I should add at this time that this is all my interpretation of this aspect of the book, and I have no idea if it's correct. In theory, I should have added that at the beginning. Oh, well.

The fact is, his motivation is selfish. He doesn't want to slip back into the blackness of depression in which he existed prior to meeting and appointing himself savior of his wife. It is too much for him to comprehend, going back to that. This is something I understand, and something Kate in theory should understand, as she gave an exceptionally cogent account of exactly how bad it is to be depressed early in the novel. (She doesn't understand; she provides the counterpoint of this discussion.) However, it gave me a lot of food for thought about our motivations for doing the things we do. The noble wish to nurture and rescue a woman with a ridiculously crippling [and unrealistic] disability, for this character, has at heart a thoroughly selfish motivation.

Is it very different for the rest of us? Aren't most of us just feeding the monkey? I've been following the implosion of Anusara yoga with some interest, and although I don't begrudge John Friend his characteristics as a flawed mortal, I do think it shows us adequately that no guru is devoted to his followers without saving some of that devotion for himself. Is any human a saint?