Notes for outline on tremendously cogent essay regarding how hot that hot shit really is.

Topics: Ben Marcus, Jonathan Franzen, geek-lit, the power of “stories,” teaching a poetry unit to 15 year olds, what’s the use of narrative inventiveness? – why need there be a use you aesthetically tone deaf Benthamite?

Cast 1: Jonathan Franzen, not so funny writer of heavily plotted, long novels, two of which I’ve read. The 27th City is in the hysterical realism vein, with lots going on but really, not much going on: lots of action, but the heartbeat factor is zero. The Corrections – yeah, I don’t know, you probably read it, so this may be unnecessary – there are memorable scenes, I guess, but memorable (for me) because puzzling (the narcissistic spouses were doing it doggy-style because her back was out and he had cut himself in a drunken episode of home improvement, idiot says what?), not penetrating.

Cast 2: Ben Marcus, I suppose, is funny. Also hard to read. (The idea of being “hard to read” – what it means, from whence this “difficulty” arises, and so on – is an animating idea of this beef.) He was an editor, recently, of the Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, or something like that. I personally have perused his Notable American Women, which I very much enjoyed but did not finish, because it was one of a number of books in which I took solace during my late collegiate Avoid Any Serious Consideration of Getting Things Done That Need Doing phase.


The apposite, preparatory quote from Wallace:
Who wouldn't love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia," blah, blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helped keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against cleveritis--you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like "Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating a Saltine." The real point of that shit is "Like me because I'm clever"--which of course is itself derived from commercial art's axiom about audience-affection determining art's value.
What's precious about somebody like Bill Vollmann is that, even though there's a great deal of formal innovation in his fictions, it rarely seems to exist for just its own sake. It's almost always deployed to make some point (Vollmann's the most editorial young novelist going right now, and he's great at using formal ingenuity to make the editorializing a component of his narrative instead of an interruption) or to create an effect that's internal to the text. His narrator's always weirdly effaced, the writing unself-conscious, despite all the "By-the-way-Dear-reader" intrusions. In a way it's sad that Vollmann's integrity is so remarkable. Its remarkability means it's rare.


The beef:
Imagine Johnny Bench going on a six-year rant against cricket. It takes three days, it’s so effete, tea is involved, the use of chewing tobacco is rarely seen, and so on. Baseball, in this country, is not threatened by cricket, but Bench is on the attack nonetheless. Literature, in this country, is not threatened by literature; it’s not really an endangered species, but a kind of boutique hobby, albeit a life-changing one, as most hobbies are for true hobbyists. A good hobby is: “defiance of the contemporary,” “a gamble,” and “it is an axiom should either seek or need rational justification. To wish to do it is reason enough.” (See Leopald, Aldo, “A Sand County Almanac.”) Now Bench wants baseball to be relevant in like a deep social sense, he thinks baseball should resonate with people rather than just be fun to watch. But Bench also thinks that being fun to watch is how baseball gets its hooks into the People, and thereupon does its culturally significant, edifying work.

And Bench, in my hastily composed SAT type figure, is to J. Franzen as cricket is to the kind of writing Franzen has been attacking. What kind of writing is that? Good question. It depends on whose ox you wish to gore. It also only is significant if you like dead oxen, which I – in this tangled analogy – very much do. Call this kind of writing “difficult,” “experimental,” “non-linearly-based narrative,” and then sigh desperately with the inexactness of the calling you have just completed. Where is Marcus in this? Marcus is the guy who calls bullshit on the whole baseball/cricket analogy, and attempts to parse out the above terms in quotation to elucidate some sense of the value of “difficult” “experimental” etc. writing.

Obviously, the beef between Ben Marcus and Jonathan Franzen is of interest to like point sex percent of the small-in-itself population of persons who have read a book from cover to cover in the past year that does not involve personal finance, Zen Buddhism, raising adolescents, or finding the optimal ovulation cycle for procreation. But (the rule says never start sentences with But) I am one of those sad point-sixers, and belonging has always mattered to me.

I do not like Jonathan Franzen, and this dislike is both personal and readerly. (readerish?). my interest is piqued when Marcus says of him:

He seems desperately frustrated by writers who don’t actively court their audiences, who do not strive for a specific kind of clarity, and who take a little too much pleasure in language. It’s a little bit like Brittany Spears complaining that the Silver Jews aren’t more melodic, or the Rockettes, despite their sold-out shows, whining about the Pina Bausch. [No idea who this pina Bausch character is]


I am stopping here. Remember these are just notes for outline, not the incredibly cogent essay that will form from the outline that forms from these notes. There is absolutely on clarification to the beef supplied in the above, but it is late, I have to get kids to think about metaphor tomorrow and I am sneezing with increasingly troubling frequency. Here is, in closing, more thoughts:

1) Marcus basically wants Franzen to quit kicking the already wounded, but not quite dead, horse. He is correct in noting that there is no grand conspiracy on the part of the experimentalists to defame or demolish the large intimidating edifice of work by Russo & Co. (I LIKE Russo, you say.). I want Marcus to explain why that horse should not just be walked to the hole we’ve dug it, and shot in the head, saving us the trouble of hooking up the chain to the F-350 and dragging it to a small dry creekbed where a grizzly and a nest of yellowjackets will pick its bones clean.
There are reasons why we want this horse, and they are not merely nostalgia. Good stories that are challenging, and in some way satisfying because challenging, are out there. I want more magicians. I want those good stories as much as I want a new album that makes it easier for me to face the day in the morning AND alters my basic configuration of what music is, and means, to me. Marcus should have done more than say: “You said no one likes to read this difficult shit. I like to read this difficult shit. Quit treating your porous subjective opinions as if they are more than what they are. Read what you want, but don’t put the bullet in the horse I like to ride.” Marcus should have helped me – and you – understand a reason to get in the saddle. (I am puking, right now, from repeating so many lame “horse” references.)
2) Pontificating. Pro forma.
3) There is more to life than books by Nick Hornsby. Speaking of, is “How To Be Good” instructive, or more of same?