Category Archives: ideas

Two comments I’m proud of.

Posted on May 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

I wrote the following comments recently. I’m proud of them.

IN RESPONSE TO THE AWL’S BOOK DISCUSSION ABOUT The Valley of the Dolls

Thanks so much for doing this. I love this book. I recently found a copy of it on the street in Brooklyn. I love it for a few reasons that I think address the first of your questions above. The first is genderized. After the VITA stats came out I looked at my bookshelf and counted the number of female authors there. It was 4 out of 65. That’s a clear injustice. So I decided to limit myself to only female authors. (I actually considered publicly boycotting DFW’s “The Pale King” for this reason. I’m doing it privately and I guess this makes it public.) When I found “Valley of the Dolls” I reveled in its critique of gender. The book stands as a monument to the terror of patriarchy and I’m pretty sure its entire genre does also, along with Peyton Place and others. These books must be re-read with this in mind. The second reason I love this book is political-economic. “Valley of the Dolls” might be the best literary critique of late capitalism I’ve ever read. About 20 pages into it I realized that the women in the story are just human beings and the men are capitalism incarnate. Reading it that way, the book provides a unique window into what our economic system does to personal relationships: every conversation is about contractual security and material gain, every sexual act is rape, and the only way to survive it tolerably is by addiction to pharmaceutical products. It echoes “Infinite Jest” in this way. For this reason–its critique of capitalism–the book deserves a lot of serious critical attention. I think Susann was aware of this facet of her work, but obviously–just judging from the way the book was marketed when it came out–nobody really understood what she was talking about. (The back cover of my edition introduces Susann by saying “This is the Doll that wrote ‘Valley of the Dolls’!” I think they missed the point.) Finally, as you’ve mentioned above, the book is well-written, compelling, and just plain riveting. It’s sexy, real, and heart-wrenching. My favorite scene is when Tony Polar shows up in the mental institution. I’m haunted by that still. It’s the only literary image that’s made me want to learn to paint just so I could paint what happens in my head in that scene. As to your other questions about celebrities, I’m not sure. I’d rather want to talk about how this book is really a statement about how we all relate to one another, particularly in New York City, the beating heart of the global hegemon. The book begs us to ask if we see ourselves and each other as commodities, as things that are bought and sold, or if we see one another as beings that deserve love and respect. Anne’s story is a tragedy for me. She comes to New York to escape the traditions of her small town, much like the founders of our nation under monarchy, looking for freedom and a good life. But better than the founding “fathers” Anne looks for love, which is different–dare I say better–than independence and private property. What does she find? A byzantine concrete jungle of humans distorting one another. And she falls prey to it, trying to “buy” Lyon’s love (which she could never have had even if she didn’t try to buy it) thereby succumbing, body and soul, to the inexorable force of late capitalism, of which Lyon is a perfect avatar. All she can do is take her pills and waste away. It brings me to tears just thinking about it. This is why I consider “Valley” a great American novel: it tells our country’s story perfectly. Is this how anyone read the book? I’m sorry to rant like this. I felt like the only person that was rereading it, so I’m ecstatic that you chose it for the book club.

IN RESPONSE TO TAO LIN’S ESSAY IN THE OBSERVER

i was talking to a friend about the stuff i blog recently and he rolled his eyes and asked me “why don’t you use that time to finish your second novel?” i still don’t have a good answer. he made me nervous because i spend so much time linking, blogging, tweeting, commenting, and not noveling. i wonder if these are a different kind of connectedness though. maybe. i think they can be done well, but it’s unclear if they get at the “noumena” mentioned here. maybe they do. i think so. maybe not. i don’t know. i think i’ve connected with tweets and blogposts and comments on essays and i think others have been in rhythm with my interiority from what are called “distractions” here. i wonder if the alphabet is the only way to compose a novel. like i wonder if being a good and peaceful person every day and just living and not writing anything could constitute a novel if one includes conversation (of any kind, maybe being is conversation) among the things that one does in this good and peaceful life. i don’t know. i think i’m beginning to distrust words and reading and “literacy.” i had the thought last week that part of the reason i read so much is that i hate reading deeply. that i just want to be read, and so i read and read and read and write and write and write just so others will read me in this kind of cycle of spiteful suffering. like when Allen Tate asks us to sit down at our hornet’s nests and love the people to whom we write–to commune, not communicate–do we really do this? am i really communing when i sit at my computer or my iphone and type type type all this alphabetic text? or am i communicating? am i commoditizing myself? do i just want to sell myself on a market of literary acceptance where wealth is measured not by my bank account but by hits counts and Google references and links and mentions and tweets containing my name? am i just an entrepreneur of myself? am i really committed to loving with my words? honestly i can’t tell. and i’m talking about myself and others here. maybe Tao Lin too, but not really. i think Tao Lin asks these questions with his writing as opposed to merely participating in the collective that blindly perpetuates them. this might be why people react so negatively to him: he’s reflecting something about themselves that they might not like so much. i don’t know. like for example i think this essay is communal, like in Tate’s sense. it’s communes. it doesn’t communicate. which is nice. there’s real love in it. especially the last paragraph. and i think people can feel that. it made me think about my own writing and whether or not i spend enough time loving or if i just sit down at this electronic hornet’s nest and hate. i don’t know. in any case, thanks. despite all the vitriol i’ve written and read and thought about in the literary world i think we should thank anyone that tries to do anything that counts as art under any definition of art. criticism could then just be one word “thanks.” so thanks.

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Watering The Fires

Posted on April 7, 2011 | Leave a comment

Eric Beeny and I met on an HTML Giant comment stream connected in part to a review I wrote of Shane Jones’s “Light Boxes.” He sympathasized with a sentiment I expressed in that review that a certain set of contemporary writers in my peer group, or the one just above mine, don’t engage in politics. I said their writing evinces a disconnected, vague, and imagistic tendency towards narcissism. Eric was much subtler about this than I was and am.

We traded a few emails to this effect, wherein he expressed an understanding of literature that I can only describe as soothing and educational. I still get angry when literature doesn’t do something actively for the world it finds, but this anger has tempered somewhat since I corresponded with Beeny (and found this great little post about celebrating anyone who refuses to sell themselves to the machine). Even the most narcissistic writers provide space for a modicum of perspective, he implied, making any literature at least a little political–even Jones’s.

It makes me wonder at this writing–a review of one of Beeny’s many books– whether political writing is just a matter of preference, or if there is some ‘ought’ in the ‘is’ when it comes to reading and writing. Whether being literary entails an imperative like: write about the world dammit, try and make it a better place asshole, don’t enjoy the smell of your MFA-tinged farts so much that you forget the human traffickers, lynchers, and dirty CEOs! Or something like that.

We should at least ask the question: Are we obligated to write political literature, or is political writing just another habit or interest? Is it like flavors of ice cream, rug color, or genre? Or are we doing the wrong thing if we don’t write with an eye toward making the best society?

I don’t know. But I was glad to meet Eric, who spoke to this question elegantly, and I was excited when he forwarded me the link to an online collection of his poems called “Watering the Fires” for me to read and write something about.

Funnily enough the poems belie the motherly element in Eric’s correspondence. He holds a fire to the world in them. There’s anger, fingerpointing, sarcasm, accusation, and all manner of doubt: doubt of self, doubt of country, doubt of pen, doubt of city, doubt of law, etc. It’s engaged enough to not be narcissistic, spare and clear enough not to be thalic, and direct enough to be pragmatic.

By themselves the poems can feel a little corny. I’ve never really known what that metaphor means. I think it means that something is so much itself it lacks irony–still not sure what corn has to do with it–but if anything Beeny’s poems sometimes lack the glow that comes from irony (something is ironic if, in some sense, it’s not what it is and is what it isn’t–or at the very least it robs what it talks about of its reality). But then calling something corny is just calling it genuine. And these poems are genuine.

At their best, the poems are, in fact, highly ironic. They hit me in the stomach in all the right ways. Here’s my favorite, “Wal-mart Families for Friendly Fire,” quoted entirely, for example:

Letting your children join the armed forces,
you might as well hold the hunting rifle yourself,
shove them off into the woods

while you chase after their memories
pumping round after blind round
practically sawing trees in half

and if even you hit one you couldn’t
hear a scream from that far away

and like when you did all your shopping
at discount department store chains
you’d pick a designated rendezvous point

so when whoever makes it out alive
comes back you can say,
Oh, thank God . . . I missed you.

Yes. Just: yes. The image at the front makes me sweat and then the middle carries me through to the end that kicks me where I must be kicked. Squarely in the moral-literary ass. (See “Kyoto Hearing Aids” for another one like this but about climate change.) And what about this line damning brand-marketing from a poem called “Parole Hearing with a reformed Charles Manson”:

Ever try reading a flashlight’s name
brand in the dark?

Oh yes. This is like the problem of the eye never seeing itself but translated into the black hole of vapid capitalist consumption. I’m definitely going to quote this aloud at some point.

But there are some corny lines, like the last stanza of “Inspector Gadget’s Erection”:

though I’m anyway too aroused by the octopus
arms I’ve welded to my psyche,
so whenever you reach to unzip your fly
that means my night-stick is gun-shy.

The phrasing here loses perspective and pushes me out. It breaks down and sounds more like mediocre slam poetry. Though I’m inclined to like the poem just because of it’s first line: “it must be real hard.”

I’m also inclined to like this chapbook a lot and recommend it. It leaves me wondering: what’s going on in political fiction and poetry right now?

At a poorly attended AWP panel on political poetry this year, one small-voiced MFA student asked this same question. She said she wrote political poems and that her classmates and professors bashed them and told her not to write “those kinds of poems” anymore because they’d never get published.

Is that the way it is? Are writers trying to make a living by their writing more than they’re trying to make life by their writing? When I went to the AWP I was shocked at how much it felt like a trade fair. A job search. A place to sell widgets. William Pitt, at that very panel on political poetry, sat behind a Marriott fold-out table with an awkward floral print tablecloth and spoke into a microphone, just as I’m sure any number of military-industrial leaders have.

Am I being unreasonable? Don’t we have an obligation as artist-citizens of the most offensive cultural empire this side of the 20th century to use our talents to point beautiful, un-ignorable fingers at the various interests bent on consuming life on earth to death?

The answer these questions is probably yes. And “Watering the Fires” is an excellent occasion to ask them again.

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A Mandolin’s Divorce: Regarding Chris Thile @ Le Poussain Rouge

Posted on March 5, 2011 | 8 comments

There’s no question Chris Thile is a superman: his talents transcend those of any human. But as we know from the history of musical genius from Mozart to Cobain, transcendence has its costs. So as a Thile fan I want to put aside compliments–many as they may be–and say what I really think about the show he played recently at Le Poussain Rouge.

Thile’s mandolin playing overflowed his mandolin. The mandolin almost couldn’t contain his own playing of her. (I’m genderizing the pronoun when referring to the mandolin, referring to “it” as “her.” You’ll see why.)

Thile’s a mandolin player. Probably the best. But his fanatical playing made the mandolin complain. She sounded like she was starting to feel uncomfortable, beginning to think she couldn’t do what he wanted to do with her. It felt almost schizophrenic. It’s obvious Thile loves the instrument. But he seemed also to hate the mandolin in his almost outrageous expectations of her. He seemed to hate her because of what he wanted to do with her as a mandolin player. It seemed like he wanted to break her limits. His playing sounded violent. But again, I don’t think Thile hates the mandolin. That’s absurd. He must love her so much that he pushes her beyond what she’s comfortable doing. So it might be tragic love, or lust, but I can’t be sure.

Whether it was love or lust or hate or all of them, the mandolin sounded at times like she’d almost had enough of him. I’m thinking of the instrumental parts of Thile’s set, particularly a stretch of Bach that he played after covering Of Montreal’s  “Gronlandic Edit.” It sounded like the mandolin wanted badly to keep up with Thile, actually enjoyed his force and wanted to go where he wanted to go with her, but started second-guessing herself. Like she knew what Thile wanted to do with her and wanted to do it with him, wanted him to have it, and gave it to him, but became exhausted in so doing. It sounded, at the limits, like she was dropping him hints: I’m getting tired, honey. I can’t keep doing this, baby. I want you, I love you, but this–I’m just not that way. She fretted and grieved–never protesting, but distinctly cautioning him: this might be too much for us.

So it wasn’t quite tragic. If the mandolin had given up on him–if the intensity of his love for her forced her away from him–then it would’ve been tragic. But she didn’t give up on him. This is just a little thing I saw at the edges of the performance. In the margins of the songs. In the weird space he created around himself on the stage, as if the spotlight demarcated his world from that of the human–his passion from reasonable intimacy.

Like I said before, he’s exceptional. But something about the performance made me think, “Take it easy.”

Having heard a little about Thile’s personal life I might caution him–apprehensively of course, I don’t know him at all–that continuing on this path may give the mandolin no other option than divorce. She won’t want to leave him. She loves him. But she might have no other choice.

What I’ve said here is probably false, overly abstract, and stupidly psychoanalytic. But I can’t ignore the sensation that Thile’s concert was disconcerting. So I’ll stick to my point and conclude.

Like the Phoenix character in X-Men whose body lives in space and time but whose superpower destroys all bodies in space and time, Thile’s great power over the mandolin–his love for her–threatens to eventually destroy their relationship. This marriage is far from over–Thile is a master and his instrument more than willing to follow him–but I heard tragedy brewing in their music.

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