I've just got around to reading both articles and this thread. Shit... There's some great thoughts being tossed around. I just went over to my bookshelf and took inventory. Looks like I'm not too much into American modern lit. Most of my books are foriegn written. World lit appeals to me for the different perspectives and cultural references presented. My church is broad. It's a big friggin' cathedral and sometimes there are crazy Japanese writers in there running amok, modern Japanese. I lean toward the classics too, whatever classic means. I think it's silly to say what should be or should not be written. I'll decide for myself what to read. I've made some bad decisions. I don't blame the writers. If all writers hit the mark perfectly there'd be too much shit for me to read.

. . .kris, you're gonna' love barabbas . . . i'm diggin' this dialogue . . .

Michael wrote: "Lastly,."

that is such a classic...

Martyn wrote: "Austerlitz is one of the best books ever written. Period - as you Americans say."

I think that would be "quote period unquote", and we would wiggle our fingers in mimical quotation marks. Just to be clear on Yankee usage. ;)

Lastly,.
mm

Austerlitz is one of the best books ever written. Period - as you Americans say.

Yeah, Ben's a fellow who digs Sebald's Austerlitz. See, I read that a few months ago and I'm still on the fence. It was only in the very last chapters that it started to come together for me, I started to click onto its wavelength. Certainly one I must read again, but if someone asked me to say one way or another whether I liked it or disliked it, I'd have to come down on the dislike side (with a long and winding "But.." following immediately afterwards). But I dig that there are people out there who do feel ecstatic about such a bizarre book (that and Nathalie Sarraute and Par Lagerkvist - just got Barabbas last week!). It gives me hope. And Shel hits the nail on the head too with the "someone who sees further, deeper, better." I've never claimed to be anyone who sees further, deeper, better, but I do try to seek out writers who do, who come at me from a perspective that's radically removed from my own (although admittedly this excludes certain categories of removed perspectives, like Hitlerites and Trekkies and Republicans).

I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that the world we live in can be rather pedestrian (I hear the shouts of "speak for yourself!" right now), and for me to read a book that makes constant references to The Simpsons (which makes constant references to other pop culture artifacts) is pedestrian to me.

I don't think that most writers whose work is awash in pop culture references use them to, as Patty states, "grapple with the problems associated, in our contemporary times, with consumer culture." To be honest, I'm not quite sure what a lot of Star Trek references are meant to accomplish. It becomes all so much advertising and - my apologies to anyone in that industry - the comedian Bill Hicks pretty much summed up my feelings on that.

Grappling with the problems associated with consumer culture is a worthy aim. I think more writers - more people - really need to deeply grapple with such problems. I'm not out to knock those who want to seriously explore these issues - I'm out to knock those who glibly throw out TV Trivial Pursuit for the sake of... well, like I said, I dunno. I also think stating that The Tale of Genji and The Trial should be dismissed on the grounds of their pop culture references is a little rich. Long spiraling sentences with footnotes about Raiders of the Lost Ark and Pepsi is not quite the same thing as making references to one's era. I've never insinuated that everyone should just write historical novels and throw anything related to the modern world over their shoulders. It's not the same thing. I also don't mind being called a "snob" by those who deign to do so (though me beer-swillin buddies might be more inclined to substitute that pesky "n" for a more fitting letter). There are worse things to be called. I think it's a fine idea for people to take a stand against mediocrity, drivel, and banality - even at the shudder-inducing prospect of being called a snob. Cheers!

I'm with you Ben. I don't read as much contemporary for just that reason... Something new, strange, better and true. I want a story that isn't my story, a writer a gazillion times smarter than me, someone who sees further, deeper, better.

I've even tried. I've read two Jodi Picoult books and one Bohjalian book and heaven help me, a Dan Brown "novel." When my kids were babies because that's about all I could manage to stay literate.

I know it's out there, but a majority of what is pumped out of houses today just... doesn't do it. I suppose I'm waiting for time to sort out the ones that approach having a vision, at which point I'll read them. Heck, Infinite Jest was published how long ago, and I'm just now getting around to it.

I struggle with that all the time in my writing. Escaping my own "bubble" and finding something more.

that's what i immediately thought of, shel; american psycho. that book uses the endless listing of brand names and pop culture bits to great effect. but in general i'm with kris on the rest of it. i don't look for verisimilitude in literature, and i am generally irritated when i encounter it. that's part of the reason i don't read contemporary lit: i don't care to see the "real" world; i want a vision. a pure vision. something stripped of the surfaces, recast as something else, something new, something strange and better and true.

unless it's satire, in which case: bring it on.

Patrick, that quote immediately made me think of American Psycho.

and forgive me, if this is veering things off course... this may speak more to rampant commercialization than it does specifically to any given stylistic choices ("hysterical realism") but, i grabbed this from david milch (creator of deadwood and john from cincinnati)

"... even soulless materialism, if willing to submit itself to the possibilities of the present moment, without distortion, can be an instrument of salvation. art can help materialism transcend that self."

kris, your post was interesting to me. a lot in there to unpack.
i don't think i agree with most of it, or at least, i don't share your distaste for the post-modern, or post-post-modern or whatever we want to call things now.

i guess i question, or take issue with, the idea that to seriously enjoy or engage with pop culture or to use "hysterical realism" as a means to tell a story is somehow a clear signal of "arrested" development, but yet a, sort of, puritanical reverence and nostalgia for "serious" literature (or the serious arts), that's just what?? high minded? sophisticated?? clearly, less "arrested"?

if i'm missing or misreading the crux of your argument i apologize but, i think Zadie had me at "broad church".

I don't mind culture references...and this idea of "dated material", well it just becomes history, doesn't it?

Patty wrote: "Jcamilo wrote: "Is there really a point complaning about what people should write instead of how good or bad."

You've hit the nail on the head, Oro. If it's well written, if it's subject matter ..."

Navel Gazing? Wait, still have to write something about Navel gazing?
I remember Poe attacking the School of Lake, of course, who among the Lake guys would poe most like? Coleridge. So, Coleridge is a genius, Wordsworth is a poetic guy who is lost trying to transform in metaphysics what is a simple matter of language.
I can not even use pop culture. The king of Pop died and I had to remember Pop was actually some short of underground anarchist movement by a bunch of wharholics...
Anyways, if American Novelists are hysterical is just because they still crazy about the quest for the american novel. Doctor Poe should have cured them long ago, but hey, he was just a jiggle maker...

Can pop culture be referred as ancient history if you were writing about a futuristic or current society or would that writer be a douchebag and is only showing off? I do recall Gravity's Rainbow using a comic as a reference: 'He was the Batman to his Robin.'

Maybe if 'Mr. Roberto' was used as a nursey rhyme in some character's memory of childhood? Would that be cool with the hardcore readers among us?

Jcamilo wrote: "Is there really a point complaning about what people should write instead of how good or bad."

You've hit the nail on the head, Oro. If it's well written, if it's subject matter is of interest to me, if it accomplishes what it sets out to do in an interesting way, that's what really matters.

To suggest limits on what writers should write about is just stupid. If you don't like contemporary fiction, don't read it. If you don't like popular culture, don't consume it.

If we were to dismiss all of the novels that include pop cultural references, we'd have to get rid of almost everything from The Tale of Genji to The Trial and on forward. And how are novelists to grapple with the problems associated, in our contemporary times, with consumer culture if they aren't allowed to make reference to it? And how will readers 100 years from now be able to picture our period in history if our novelists don't discuss things that are actually monopolizing our citizenry? (For example, I've only ever come across two novels that even attempt to address the effects of television on our daily lives.)

It just all seems very snobbish and silly to me.

And by the by, what do you all mean by navel gazing? Are we talking about that habit of self-absorption so accuratly depicted in the charater of Raskolnikov?

"Yeah I was joking...I remember the Nobel Prize for Literature dude said it...of course, it is a lot of nonsense. "

Martyn, you need to get into the fine art of using emoticons. Like those little heart symbols and stuff.

(That was also a joke. I hate emoticons. Parens, semicolons and colons are punctuation. I stand by my old-fashioned, anachronistic opinion.)

Hey Kris, how do you feel about emoticons being used in books these days? ::duck::

I agree with you Kris, when it comes to just about everything I've read... except Infinite Jest.

I don't know... popular culture vs. culture. Is there really a difference? I mean, people who go to operas drink Diet Coke in the lobby during intermission. And culture ... seems like such a catchall word as to be almost meaningless.

If I were to differentiate in art... popular culture, to me, is both expressed, even defined, mostly by movies. Or the crap pushed at my kids by Disney.

It's discussed in Infinite Summer - how the pop culture aspect of what he does will limit the lifespan of the book, make the work not survive past my generation.

That may be true, but I am not so sure he cared.

But there's this other guy who wrote with a lot of cultural references... whatshisname... oh yeah. That Joyce guy. Among the tools needed to really penetrate Ulysses: a map of Dublin from the early 20th century with the names of chapters overlaid so you know where they took place. And even when you have it, they don't make sense if you haven't been to Dublin (and Dublin when I was there in the 80s is vastly different from Dublin now), which is a different place than it was then anyway... so what's the point?

The point is that Joyce didn't ignore that who he was and where he was in history had an undeniable influence on his work. And, to try to deny it - to write something so timeless it had no cultural reference points - well, would have defied the point of having the book connect to The Odyssey - the theme of exploring the known world, and touching the unknown, too.

Heck, I'd even argue that The Odyssey has pop culture references. To roasting pigs.

Shel wrote: "Martyn wrote: "Can't we all just say modern American literature is too parochial?"

I dunno... parochial is a copout the same way "patriarchal" is a copout."

Yeah I was joking...I remember the Nobel Prize for Literature dude said it...of course, it is a lot of nonsense.

Shel wrote: "There are so many levels. First, the popular culture level. "

And here I'll admit a natural and strong bias against authors who obsessively include pop culture references. First of all, it dates the work, fast. Second, it's a whole wide world out there: why obsess so over American pop culture? I understand that it's all around us, it's constantly ringing in our ears, but I (rightly or wrongly) see it as a sign of superficiality for an author to litter a book with it. I'm not saying that limited-scale pop allusions, if the author feels it's necessary for the piece to feel "current," will ruin the work for me - but too much too often and it just seems like the writer being glib and showing off what a cool kid he is. Hey, I like Lou Reed, too, but if I were to write a book, horrid unreadable tome though it may be in every other way, the words "Lou Reed" would never appear. He does just fine without a plug from me. So do Doritos and The Simpsons.

I know it stems from a desire to "speak to our times," but there are ways of doing that on a deeper, truer, and better thought-out manner than by penning something along the lines of "I was driving my trusty 2002 Honda Civic along Highway 69, Lou Reed was on the radio, and I got to thinking about Star Trek episode twelve where Kirk and Spock beam down to planet Ajax to confront the dreaded Skulnums, and how that episode seemed a fitting metaphor for my relationship with my parents, the erupting volcano on Ajax that would consume the Skulnums so like the eruptive argument we had last night over a succulent meal of Pop's TV Dinners." etc etc. That kind of stuff gives me a splittin headache.

Martyn wrote: "Can't we all just say modern American literature is too parochial?"

I dunno... parochial is a copout the same way "patriarchal" is a copout.

And I thought James Woods was an actor, then I remembered I was the only one that would do such typo...
Who this guy Wood want to be anyways? I remember Poe used to attack Wordsworth for his excessive meditation, selfness and importance instead of simplicity... or maybe Borges tirades against Neruda for him thinking that every text must had a political position...
Is there really a point complaning about what people should write instead of how good or bad.

Can't we all just say modern American literature is too parochial?

Of course, because it is a dialectic, an omphalitic conversation throughout time and history.

. . . but isn't DFW just aspiring to be kurt vonnegut jr., in many ways? broom of the system is like a long self-conscious vonnegut novel to me . . . and isn't KVjr just aspiring to be voltaire on some level? . . .
. . .hi-ho and so it goes, in this, the most beautiful of all possible worlds . . .i view literature as a dialectic not unlike philosophy . . . a sort of call-and response through the ages . . . and btw, great post above, kris . . .

I like your thoughts here.

I was thinking as I was reading the second to last paragraph that it seems like what you're talking about would fall into the category of attempting to imitate David Foster Wallace.

I know, I know. I'm kind of stumping for the guy now.

But no, really.

When I am reading IJ, it is just like reading Ulysses (haven't tried Finnegan's Wake yet). I read a passage. Catch my breath. Go back. Read it again.

There are so many levels. First, the popular culture level. Then, the academic or intellectual one. Then, the DFW Gaze - the one he levels at the world seems to see everything so clearly, so that the other levels slip away. And finally, the heart of it.

There is a lot to untangle, and some of it appears to be a "look how good I am at tennis and math" kind of thing - a demonstration of his brilliance - but in a book that might be an imitation, there would be no more than just that demonstration. Or maybe a little bit more, but not much.

With him - there is a beating, golden, suffering, black, aching heart in everything. There is contradiction. There is so much pain. There is so much love. Even in the details, he is building and building you to the point where you either decide to let the book in, in which case it changes your life, or not, in which case you hold it at arm's length.

He is all about letting the book in.

Keith wrote: wood is talking about writers who rely on a sort of sustained zaniness in place of what should be solid characterization and plotting.


Right. But for me it's the tedious frivolity and self-absorption of these kinds of books. They're not written by stupid people, they just demonstrate a very superficial sort of intelligence, the manic chatter of the short attention-span age. Or as Wood says:

novels of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very "brilliant" books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being.

I like the word "arrested" here: these books and their celebrators spring from the same mentality that tells people they ought to take Batmen and the angst of callow adults seriously. Batmen and Harry Potter and Gee-I-gots-middle-class-blues are celebrations of never having emerged from teenagerdom. And to justify that retrograde thinking, we must now dub comic books graphic novels.

The point Wood is making is not that literature shouldn't be "a broad church," or that all books have to be Important and make Monumental Declarations on the State of the Human Condition, but that the flippant, oh-so-ironic, I'm-real-real-good-at-Trivial-Pursuit-yup is what dominates the "literary" scene today. Wood traces it to Underworld and its imitators, but I think it goes further back: the twin towers of Catcher in the Rye and Gravity's Rainbow, books which whatever their literary merits have wrought the twin phenoms of navel-gazing whine and diarrhetic sentences with much loopy character names - Zaggy Goosewallow, say - that flit between the conspiracy to assassinate Lenin pre-revolutionary St Petersburg and the tragic business failure of Zaggy's lemonade stand in that blissful summer when Hootie and the Blowfish was all the rage. I mean, who gives a shit?

Right now I'm tied up with two Russian books: Nabokov's stories, mostly translations of stuff he wrote in the '20s and '30s, and Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Abandoned, about the dreariness and terror of Stalinist Russia and her husband poet's life before his deportation to the Siberian labor camp where like so many others he would simply disappear (it wasn't until many years later that she started to unearth information about his last days). I think they're both great, but for very different reasons. They are totally different people, and surely it would be an uncomfortable thing for them to be in a room together (Mandelstam even makes a point to say she doesn't like Nabokov in her memoir). Nabokov, with his impeccably constructed sentences, his lightness and brilliance, his aristocratic melancholy, and Mandelstam, the old woman who's endured unimaginable hardship behind the Iron Curtain and lived to tell the tale, whose life was devoted solely to preserving her husband's works from being annihilated in the same way his body was, and whose book is primarily valuable as a record of her times: here we have to personalities who both have places in Zadie Smith's "church of literature." What unites them is seriousness of purpose. Both are scornful of what they see as bad art. Nabokov, for all his lightness, is not flippant, or smug, or smitten with how cool and clever he is. He was dead serious about his work, and the language in this book of his is so beautiful, it gives you the shivers, it can break your heart. One of the lesser stories of this book, one sliver, is worth than the latest 800-page tome of post-modernist drivel.

I am. I love it. SO much more food for thought. I would miss so much if I didn't use that site as I went. I am behind, of course, but life is starting to settle down, so now I have more focused time to dedicate.

I was just sending a couple of excerpts to a friend today. The most recent post on DFW's influence on the YA world was good, but did you catch that one where the guy used the book for drug rehab? (Unsuccessfully, but still.) The one about really letting the book in.

The one word that I keep seeing in relation to DFW and everything he created is heartbreaking.

Infinite Jest A Novel by David Foster Wallace. Shel - are you on the Infinite Summer site this summer? A lot of good commentary from the people reading this book this summer.

What's the name of that book?

Michael, the perfect mix of sustained zaniness and great characterization and plot, no? I love it, too. A very good read.

Keith wrote: "patty, what he's talking about is the fact that there are novels upon novels out there that feature wheelchair-riding ambidextrous bean farmers from south tonga who have twelve identical daughters ..."

The book I’m reading now has as part of its cast a band of paraplegic Canadian assassins in wheelchairs aiming to capture a DVD which renders viewers comatose and incontinent, a guru who floats 6" over the top of the towel rack in a boy’s locker room and survives off licking the sweat of others, gigantic feral human infants attacking New England, and a President of these United States who is a cross between Elvis and Howard Hughes. Is this what you are talking about?

Damn good book, by the way.

mm

Jonathan wrote: "Keith wrote: "patty, what he's talking about is the fact that there are novels upon novels out there that feature wheelchair-riding ambidextrous bean farmers from south tonga who have twelve identi..."

I think existentialism has done a lot of damage in the arts...especially literature...there are some classic texts for sure...but I think a lot of writers seem to assume that existentialism means being miserable, aloof and selfish...it has lead down a path of intense subjectivity and over-developed senses of self-importance...not really individuality...just self-importance. This is a generalisation, sure...but I feel it contains a grain of truth. Anyway, post-modernism is dead...it's now alter-modernism...apparently.

Keith wrote: "patty, what he's talking about is the fact that there are novels upon novels out there that feature wheelchair-riding ambidextrous bean farmers from south tonga who have twelve identical daughters ..."

. . .interesting, because i've been complaining lately about the overabundance of authors hiding behind realism and post-modern apathy. . . existentially disaffected, slacker protagonists complaining of boredom and lack of meaning in life . . . not that i'd prefer cat-juggling siamese twins with tourettes, or anything . . .

I had a writing teacher once who kept telling us to "up the ante" in every scene. Ramp up the conflict! Add in unexpected twists!

So how many of those does a writer add, with no attendant contemplation or exploration, before the story makes no sense at all?

You can only imagine what kind of stuff was read aloud, that shouldn't have been, in that class.

keith, you should totally write that book! except maybe without that "born upside down" part... that part seemed a little tacked on.

Keith wrote: "...wood is talking about writers who rely on a sort of sustained zaniness in place of what should be solid characterization and plotting.

well thank goodness sustained zaniness and characterization/plot aren't mutually exclusive, or i would have absolutely nothing to read.

patty, what he's talking about is the fact that there are novels upon novels out there that feature wheelchair-riding ambidextrous bean farmers from south tonga who have twelve identical daughters all named 'Sue' and are building rocket ships out of toilet rolls while whistling the 'star spangled banner' backwards...because they were born upside down. or something. wood is talking about writers who rely on a sort of sustained zaniness in place of what should be solid characterization and plotting.

i read these yesterday morning, and i found the experience a little disturbing. i should have read the date of the essay before i started reading the text.

there were probably a lot of passionate responses because it was published about a month after 9/11. talk about hysteria... but as for "hysterical realism" he doesn't really explain what he means by it. i agree with Martyn, it really amounts to the fact that he doesn't care for postmodernism in fiction.

I've never heard of something called "the New York novel"...isn't this article lambasting post-modernism in literature...and this term "hysterical realism"...has it taken off and in usage? I'm not so sure about that.

Zadie Smith (also an old uni friend of my sister) is quite right in her response regarding "hysterical times"...especially as it lead into something so Baudrillardian as the media war on terror...and I also agree with her assessment that literature should be a "broad church"...calling for the end of a trend in literature Wood sees as vacuous...it seems a little narrow-minded to me...let them hang themselves...let their literature disappear over time...will they achieve immortality like Dante, Shakespeare, Chaucer and Homer? The answer is no.

It does annoy me sometimes when writers pose as intellectuals and cultural theorists...it is obviously something akin to modernism and the fact of a university education getting in the way. Sometimes, it is egomania.

However, literature doesn't have to be one thing or another...and using a political and social catylst such as 9/11 seems self-important on Wood's part...it wasn't a wake up call...more a war cry.

James Wood popped up on the back cover of my recently-purchased Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov - "a tutor in exquisiteness" was his contribution to the field of Nabokov jacket blurbs, and he's dead right. It's so good, this book, just breathtakingly great, and while reading it I began to wonder who would get the kind of kick out of it that I do. I don't think many would, really. I think most people would find it dull. But I got to wondering: Who is this James Wood? Why has this name flitted across my radar on a number of occasions recently? What is it trying to tell me? So I dug around online for Mr. Wood, and came across an article of his at The Guardian that stirred some passionate responses. Wood has also written some books on literary criticism I haven't read. Here is the article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/oct...

And Zadie Smith's reply:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/oct...

Anyone fall down on a side of the fence here?