Showing posts with label Literature writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature writing. Show all posts

Sunday, September 11, 2011

the failure of some 9-11 literature


A week ago, after work, on a crosstown bus, and all I wanted for the half-hour ride was to read the galley of  Don DeLillo's novel, Falling Man, a ruminative narrative highlighting the lives of New Yorkers on the day of the attacks, 9/11. Finally, a novel about the attack that matters, not to give too much away, but this is prime DeLillo, exploring the sober side of what was White Noise's premise for a postmodern comedy, the disruption of fixed and certain lives by the intrusion of an event beyond imagination.
In White Noise, the effect was comic, funny, and all ironies laid in the day were comedies of the clueless trying to make peace with the nagging changes that cause everyone to avoid the void as they try to retool old habits with new explanations, theories, contrived proofs that the world will return to normal. Now it's a tragedy, and the quality of irony finds itself made ironical. The attack on the World Trade Center puts us beyond abstractions like comedy or tragedy, on which one can grasp onto something fixed in their minds as a normality they can get back to. All is muted, rendered mute. Rationalization is deferred. And our expectations of what DeLillo would make of the penultimate attack on America's symbolic sense of being the world's best asset mounted to levels that were nearly toxic with glee.

DeLillo, however, is a writer who might have played out his themes and investigations of a hyper-technological democracy whose inhabitants are searching for a useful past as a way to make the fractured, reshuffled, and decentered present at least seem to have thematic continuity. "Falling Man," the 9/11 novel, strikes me as a book of riffs from a musician who can barely muster the energy to run through his songbook one more time. In the odd sense, in the cruelly ironic sense, it's a tragedy that the attack on the World Trade Center attack happened after DeLillo hit his peak with "Underworld," as masterful of the novel of America our propensity for distracting ourselves in ritual, obsessions, insane hobbies and esoteric systems of knowledge--performance art, baseball history, high finances, unrepentant consumerism, ceaseless works of charity--to keep the suspicion that all our material gains and assumptions are based on no fixed moral platform.

There are some fine sentences here, some splendid descriptions, but there is listlessness as well. "Falling Man" is finally dull, and even DeLillo's prose mastery can't make this alternating saga of survivor despair and terrorist preparation rise above the merely serviceable. DeLillo is overwhelmed by the topic, not so much for the impossibility of writing a brilliant novel in the post-attack atmosphere, but because all the themes he has relevant to the present condition are expressed more powerfully, poetically, with larger and surer measures of canon-making genius than the comparatively provincial exercise the author has issued here. It’s also a matter of whether beautiful writing is appropriate for a novel specifically concerning itself with the physical and psychic costs of 9-11; folks like Laura Miller, Meghan O’Rourke, and Frank Rich have wrestled with the issue of whether drawing metaphors and similes for larger contemplation is somehow immoral when addressing the events so catastrophic and fatal. Art, in the uppercase, means framing the materials and objectifying them, taking them from their contexts and positioning them in ways that will force a deliberation over their existence; this is the aesthetic distance, beauty removed from our hands and set aside so we can contemplate some feelings in the absence of real-world distraction. 9-11 is thought by many to be above such contemplation that this date cannot be abstracted as material for art-making, literary reflection.

Brat Pack novelist Manhattanite extraordinaire Jay McInerney got the urge to step up to the plate and write a Great American Novel, a work that would raise him finally from the middle rungs of the literary ladder and allow him to reach the top shelf where only the best scribes--Hemingway! Fitzgerald! Thomas Wolfe!-- sit and cast their long collective shadow over the fields of aspiring geniuses, furious scribblers all. McInerney has selected a large subject to make his reputation, the catastrophe that was and remains 9/11. Acutely aware that the minor league satires and soft coming of age stories that made his name were fewer commandings than they had been because "9/11 changed everything" (a phrase destined to be the characterizing cliche of this age), he offers us The Good Life, a mixed bag of satiric thrusts, acute social observation, two-dimensional characterizations and wooden generalizations about the sagging state of society, of culture, of our ability to understand one another, locally and globally.

I agree that Jay McInerney is a better writer than he's been credit, but history will judge his novels as minor efforts at best. Witty and observant, yes he is, but how he conveys his best lines, his choicest bon mots have the thumbed-through feeling of a style borrowed. Fitzgerald, Capote, and John Cheever are his heroes, true. Still, there's nothing in McInerney's writing that honors his influences with the achievement of a tone and personality that is entirely his own, an original knack of phrase-making that makes a reader wonder aloud how such wonderful combinations of words are possible. His influences, alas, are visible and seem to be peering over his shoulder. Even what one would praise as sharp and elegant observations from his keyboard creaks not a little. The style sounds borrowed, and our author sounds much, much too dainty to make it really cling to the memory: "The hairstylist was aiming a huge blow-dryer at his wife's skull, which was somewhat disconcertingly exposed and pink--memento mori--in the jet of hot air ... "

McInerney is compared to Fitzgerald relentlessly since his career as a professional writer began, in so much he, like F.Scott, was bearing witness to a generation of conspicuous consumption and waste. Still, one notices that any random paragraph from The Great Gatsby contains more melody by far. The writing genius of Fitzgerald, when he was writing at his absolute best, was his ability to make you forget the fact that you're reading elegant prose and have you become entranced by it. It was a means to put you in a different world altogether. It's this simple, really; you didn't see him writing, you didn't see him sweat. Able craftsman and a peerless stylist when he was performing best, Fitzgerald's prose seemed natural, buoyant, unstrained. McInerney's writing reveals that strain, that slaving over phrase and clever remark, and often the effect seems calculated. In his best moments, he rarely sheds the sophomore flash; after all these years, our Manhattan golden boy still writes like the most gifted student in a Kansas City composition class. After all these years, he is still trying to outrace the long shadows of those who brought him reading pleasure.

This is a wandering and traipsing along with the subject matter like a drunk tourist gawking at the bizarre ways of the big city, a laughable and loathsome tour of Corn's intellectual baggage.   "Windows on the World," a poem written by Alfred Corn and published in Slate on September 11, 2003, is an ill-conceived poem commemorating the attack on the World Trade Center that would seem to confirm the skeptic's view that poets are willfully suffering narcissists who think everything in the world is in play to disturb their peace. In other words, to fuck with them. It's strange, odd, perverse, and somewhat immoral to write a poem using the 9/11 attack as a pretext to write another self-infatuated poem that really is more about how much the writer thinks about himself and his assignation as a "poet"; whatever the god damned what Corn puts on his tax return as "occupation" has to do with the still barely speakable horror this day has come to mean is beyond any sense I can find. Worse, it is beyond anything useful to others. 

Connecting the attack with the crashing of the Windows operating system is a ploy for him to remain a thousand miles from any connection with real emotion; it is relentlessly ironic and snobby in its form as a poem. The subject matter, the real horror, is aestheticized out of mind the way a narcotic lulls one into a stupor and then a nod against a world that still must be faced and made sense of. Corn does none of that at all, but what he does do is give us a long, wavering, and arrogantly ambivalent stretch of muddled semiotics where everything is a straining reach, a forced association, a willful perversion of real imagist reach. Had the subject not been so grim and disheartening, this would seem more parody than anything else. This poem angers me to no end. If Corn was paid for this piece, he should feel honor-bound to donate the sum to a cause that gives hope to others in the human community. Following that, he might quit whatever teaching job he has in writing and get a job in the receiving area of a Salvation Army Thrift Store.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

notes on a dead horse or two

More than ever, I believe The Fountainhead, to be a dangerous book. This may worry a point already mulled over here, but one cannot just pass-off this book's implicit assertion that mass destruction is justified in the name of "higher values" whose substance supposedly overrides the need to respect and protect human life. It is only irrational romanticism and literary convenience that Rand softens Roark's destruction with an empty structure.  Roark is the hero of all those ruggedly individualist libertarians whose opinions sound as oddly uniform as Comuntist Party USA position paper, but shed of the that odious veil, he's pretty much the prototype of the perplexed goons and gangsters whose lives are committed to making the world notice them by the most miserable means available. 

I've little problem with "enlightened self interest", a general concept where one pursues their own agenda with it in mind that their goal is not just to fulfil their own wants and needs but also benefit others in doing so. One "does well by doing good" when they realize that their rights are coherent and effectively applicable in larger social and cultural contexts. 

Rand lops off the "enlightened" part and effectively tries to make an intellectual defense for adults, males for the most part, to act like three years olds and essentially demand that the world bow to their self-defined genius and all the pulverizing engineering it takes for said genius to be foisted on the community. It's a childish view, the mewling of King Baby, and it is, frankly, solipsistic to a degree that approaches a species of mental illness. 
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The existence of God can neither be proven nor proven in absolute terms, and is that belief in either proposition requires an act of faith, faith being a firm belief in something for which there is no proof . The acts of faith, in William James' estimation in his writing in Varieties of Religious Experience, is the relevant quality to watch; if the belief and the dictates the faith espouse result in helping its membership adjust, adapt and find purpose in a world that subjects them to all sorts of catastrophies and seeming cruelties, then that is reason enough . The existence or non-existence of God comes out of the equation: we look at the results of the faith, and see how it's contributed to the General Good; the description and standard can apply to believer and atheist alike.
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Noted pop musicians in twelve step meetings often seem bursting at the seams to tell other members what it is they do and what their latest projects are. It's a testimony to most of them that they contain the impulse to brag and speak in a general way. Bill Wilson had the same dilemma, in terms of keeping his vanity in check, and wrote about in in both the book Alcoholics Anonymous and The Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions. It was a fitting thing for me to read that the man who warned against being the AA big shot had to live up to his own advice.

Eric Clapton's celebrity doubtlessly shields him from any blow back concerning his well publicized battles with booze and the needle , mostly because the public is quick to forgive those who've gone astray but who have gone to well-publicized lengths to clean up their side of the street. We see the same thing happening with Robert Downey, a repeat screw up and jailbird who a few years ago just made it a point to work as much as he could, prove himself reliable, bondable, professional. It paid off, as he more or less owned last summer's box office. In their cases, celebrity might work as a sufficient substitute for the lack of anonymity, but it comes down, again, to whether the famed addict or alkie has willingness to change their lives. Talent figures into it as well; fans just want Clapton to play blues guitar and prefer to see Downey peform well in good roles, and are willing to suspend their misgivings over their bad habits provided the entertainers do just that, entertain.







Friday, February 13, 2009

"Easy to read and melodious prose is one of the least natural things in the world.


In the course of a mad email exchange with a friend in Pittsburgh about writers and their strategies to creating a prose style that effectively conveyed their stories in all their obvious and more oblique consequences, I was struck by my friend's incidental declaration that "Easy to read and melodious prose is one of the least natural things in the world. " But who wants to read anything that has absolute fidelity to natural speech, whatever "natural" speech happens to be? The ear wants something better formed, and memory wants something that is, well, memorable. What is natural, if anything can be, is a human desire for things that are elegant,balanced, pleasurable to behold, a joy to the senses. What makes these pleasures varies radically in subjective examination, and that is what makes talking about the differences a peculiar pleasure in itself.


"Easy to read and melodious prose" has been the ideal since the creation of the professional writer: it's not far a field to say that humans generally prefer clarity over confusion, and to develop methods, developed through experimentation, to achieve those goals. Because we are a species that's smart enough to demonstrably learn new habits through different kinds of training or learning--whether mechanical or in the acquisition of cultural topsoil-- my thinking is that that a clear style is really a natural expression of human habit, determined however that habit might be. Culture itself, the abstract idea condensed histories gathered along a relentlessly twined strands, is indeed artifice on the face of it, but the formation of culture and it's aesthetic distinctions is hardly unnatural to anything one might think is alien to some wordy definition of man's "natural" state.

It's all natural, in other words: most everything we do, whatever our convolutions as a species carry us to on whatever tide of rhetoric, ideology and religious infamy, is the result behavior that is , of course, animal, species related, but also quite human, quite "natural" .We are not outside of nature, but rather our expressions are quite natural within it's all encompassing sphere, and the development of a musical style in order to express some sense of an individual experience of one's environment, the poetry of the moment, falls handily into the categories of "natural" acts.

More useful, perhaps, might be to consider the word "natural" with regards as to how a writer can create a plausible, believable voice within and without their narrative technique: DeLillo and Hemingway, stylized as they are, created powerful voices that compel response. The styles are connected to ideologies that themselves define a poetic/philosophical superstructures that lay final claim to the progress of history, and it is here where discussion as to the use of the voice becomes "natural" in it’s sound and tone, in it's tropes as it outlines a world view.

Monday, December 3, 2007

Baker and Beckett

This isn't about poetry, but it's what I've been reading, and it's what's kept me in my chair 'til too late at night, that being the semi-fictions of Nicholson Baker. Not a pleasant experience, if reading, as Barthes claims, is an activity we do, at heart, for the pleasure of the text. This was more like a calculus assignment, an exercise to see if I've been being attention to the most current shifting in what is considered fiction. I think I was ahead while I was still napping. The general reeling I get from the Baker work I've read, U and I, Mezzanine, Vox : aimless wandering around a subject, speculation for its own sake, a kind of dithering response to extrinsically urgent circumstances, something very much like going up and down an elevator. This is the writing of distraction, and it's a body of work that is compellingly shallow in its aim, a window display.

Very post-modern, I'd say, but it's disturbing to think that men and women who are nominally good writers can fill up pages and bandwidth with a tweaked yammering that exists only to avoid the ideas they begin with in the subject line. This is very much like Beckett's' novels, Malloy, Malone, The Lost Ones, More Pricks than Kicks, and here we have the link with the Late Modernism that had the creator (author) and subject (novel) rising, in their imperishable need to produce, from the noisy clash and clutter of an aesthetic philosophy that demanded new ways of putting the world together, of making the world non-liner and multi-faceted, sufficiently prepared to be remade with technology and criteria. The Beckett/Baker writer seems to face the endless variations they may take for a narrative, and instead defer the decision about which one to take and what sort of fictional ethos to manufacture. The deferral is the subject itself, the eye-averting technique that wills itself to be endlessly about the undesirability of how the reality should be written into being. This is a sub-stratum in the thought of postmodern writers, the avoidance of death through the refusal of becoming engagement of any process of decision-making that would definition to a sphere of activity that must then be engaged, acted within.