Chew on this gristle

<--------------------- Word on the street is, he knew not to what love of a woman amounted. Interesting eyes, though.








As someone with an almost pathological need to read words, digest stories, etc., i am intrigued by a conversation going on right now over at slate between two men who make stories out of words.

the one, walter kirn, lives somewhere within five to eight hours of me. i once read a personal essay he wrote on meritocracy (large topic) and entering an Ivy League school with a very common, small-town middle class background and an autodidact's penchant for being insecure about origins (pathway to large topic). i could, as the kids these days say, Identify.

The other one, Gary Shteyngart, wrote a book called Absurdistan, part of which was excerpted in the New Yorker and read by this guy here. It was a story worth taking a second look at.

I don't know much more than this about either gentlemen, but their early remarks have plumbed questions that nag me on occasion, when I lie in bed staring at the ceiling and listen to the kids outside my window roleplay scenes from Boyz N the Hood with distinctly Indian accents. They are (the gentlemen's remarks) intelligently rendered, which is why I gave you the link above.



So. It seems to me that they are talking about stuff that matters to people who have an almost pathological need to read words, digest stories, etc. and/or people who try to write little collections of words that amount to fictive worlds that, to break into the idiom, "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." Stuff like how technology and the first person narrator-friendly world it has engendered may cataclysmically cripple fiction, what stories do and why the matter, why email makes it easier to break up with someone (Holla! Been there, had that done to me), and other sundry topics. Plus there's little feel-good nuggets of an autobiographical
nature that may resonate with Core Audience in gratifying ways.

Here is something from Gary:

Before I became a novelist, I attended the Oberlin Institute for Special People out in the American Midwest, a school brimming with ambitious musicians; clever sculptors; sexy, muscular dancers; and other hard-core lovers of the arts. When I graduated in the mid-'90s, I moved to New York, where I met all kinds of people, some from the Institute, some not. We were a motley group to be sure, hardly a writers' collective, and, in fact, only I ended up pursuing writing. The rest followed their lifestyle choices to become a lawyer for an investment bank, a film student, a professor of American history, an economist, an inmate of a Florida penitentiary, and so forth.
We weren't walking "spectacles of expression," to borrow your words, but we were curious, and our curiosity was rooted in literature. We talked about books casually. We didn't strain to find meaning in them. Our lives were a complex weave of love and wonder, desire and melancholy, alcohol and drug use, friendship and romance, fear of death and fear of life, work and more work. But our lives were also peopled by fictional characters who sauntered through our waking days and lingered in our dreams. We saw the dot-com boom through the gargantuan appetites of John "Slick" Self, the protagonist of Martin Amis' Money (set in the Thatcher era, but close enough). We saw our crappy paralegal jobs through the prism of Bartleby and wondered when we, too, would "prefer not to."
When our hearts were broken, we cried into our Pilseners while referencing Kundera's hapless lovers. We walked through New York, as literary a city as the world has ever seen, with everyone from Wharton's Newland Archer to Ellison's Invisible Man by our side. This wasn't about education or self-expression or our lights shining brightly after we were gone. We weren't out to learn anything about ourselves. We were out to have fun while assuaging our miseries, and any moron back then could have told you that without books, the good life simply wasn't possible.


Nice evocation, right? Except it's kind of discomfitting to be reminded of the celerity with which you are succumbing to a gradual letting go of the social configuration that is your tribe, or have already let go of it, and in the process your book-lens superpowers gradually diminish through lack of practice. I liked that life (cue nostalgia flute, Willy). I chose to leave it, not realizing quite what the leaving would do to the book-lensing, but acquiring in the process the means to also leave behind some of the technological detritus that this conversation takes as one of its animating poles. I wouldn't deign to call this a tie, as it consists of two things that do not interact except in that from which they originate: the Urban to Country migration. [Insert transition to autobiographical conundrum-tackling about the future present tense]

And I'm at that bridge, or I guess I'm at that Frostian two-pathed fork, where I must consider taking semi-Ludditism and Montana hideawaying to a more advanced evolutionary condition, or abandoning it as my personal early to mid-twenties escapade that served a purpose of delaying my ascendancy into a respectable, professional life. This life is sort of what you would expect (coherent, stable, with future cash outlays and probable ring-exchanging) with a few early twenty-first century updates (hummus, 401K, solar panels? who knows?). The other life consists of growing a much larger beard, taking away all screens from life, finding a cabin, buying a chainsaw, and scrounging out a semi-impoverished, but relatively unentangled existence.

Being somewhat NeoAristotelian, I suppose I will cut a middle path, and cheers to that. I have no desire to dissipate the ebb and flow conflict of the desire to satiate consumptive desire and the desire to satiate the desire for ascetic purity. But I'm edging towards incomprhensiability. The backdrop of my personal conundrum is the larger question of how one ought to stand in relation to modernity, which encompasses a lot I know but I couldn't bear to parse it out as how one stands in relation to modernity's offal, "progress."
Now it doesn't seem that "one" (you or me, I guess, is what I should say) has to have done the required reading for this term to notice that there's no reason to feel obliged to even ask this question, much less be catalyzed into searching for an answer. Why not just drink, eat, talk, watch, sweat, shit, fuck, scratch, and periodically reflect on the sum effect of these activities until it comes time to die? Books, in my experience, are why not. They, or the change they catalyze in me, won't allow for not giving into curiosity, which means they won't allow you to not wrestle with the pangs of uncertainty that come on curiosity's platter.

Now I am required to exit the building before the alarm goes off (I type this from the classroom in which I teach, housed in a school that has a security system, the existence of which system requires that I call a 1800 number and inform someone - usually Amanda or Alexis - that I am venturing into the classroom for X amount of time. They ask that X be both very specific and rigorously hewed to. Is why i go now).