Black Garterbelt

The Gas Face #3

In an otherwise reasonable review of Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (Believer 10/07), your pal finds this:

Since the beginning of his career, Johnson's had an ear for the gritty nuances of speech, but the dialogue in this book has the stamp of lived-and-learned life, as if we're eavesdropping on real people talking real talk, not the fragmented pseudo-speak that afflicts all too many of our avuncular auteurs.

Mr. Michod gets the Gas Face for this, both for his puzzling insistence that "real" = "good" and his vague shot-across-the-bow on unnamed "avuncular auteurs."  (I thought at first that this was a shot at DeLillo, but he's not an auteur, quite, is he?  Whoever could he be talking about?  Altman?)

By the way, the dialogue quoted in support of this assertion goes as follows:

"Family better count for something. Because nothing else does."
"You got that right."
"You ready for a burger?"
"Does the Pope wear a dress?"

I don't exactly mind this exchange, but it seems like a combination of tough-guy realism (Carver, Ford, Wolff) and the "Let's Get a Taco" scene from Reservoir Dogs.  Which is all well and good, except that in being so it doesn't quite seem like real people talking real talk.

In fact, I don't know what real people talking real talk is.  I suspect, though, it's whatever Brett Favre and his pals sound like as they hang out in rugged Wrangler jeans during his bye week.  Oh, for a transcript of that instead of another White Noise to confound us!

Closing the Loop

Hey: Your pal made the NY Times.  (Sort of.)  For being somewhat of a jackass.  (Of course.)  But I am also man enough to admit that there is, in fact, an ad for Barbary Shore that is perhaps the grandfather of the recent Discomfort Zone ad.*  (It gets points for including J.R. "Bob" Dobbs' evil twin, but I would say that the Deer Park ad is funnier.)

It should also be noted that Franzen's publisher skews 5-to-2 in favor of positive blurbs.  That's not cricket.

(*Mr. Garner's facts were wrong only insofar as he was thinking of the Barbary Shore ad instead of the one for The Deer Park to which his commenter was referring.)

Fran-ZOOOOOOOOONE!

Garth Risk Hallberg at The Millions brings our attention to the print ad campaign for the paperback version of Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone, which uses both positive and negative blurbs.  For example:

• "Luminous, essential reading" - Tim Adams, The Observer (London)
• "Odious...incredibly annoying" - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

This is the appropriate approach for someone whom I find to be humorously Manichaean.

I'm sorry to say, however, that even if effective the campaign isn't terribly original.  Mr. Esposito somewhat rhetorically asks: Am I the only one to find the "counterintuitive" marketing of Franzen's paperback a big yawn?

That might be because you've seen this Full Disclosure/Hairshirt & Humility approach used a time or two before.  (Ahem.)

It also might be because the Franzen-branded FD/H&H is a very hedged (neutered?) version of the gambit Norman Mailer played for The Deer Park in, uh, 1955.

Here's some background:

Critics, aware that the wunderkind of The Naked and the Dead had evolved into an enfant terrible, were not happy. In fact, the two novels Mailer wrote during this period, the politically charged Barbary Shore (Rinehart, 1951) and the sexually explicit The Deer Park (Putnam, 1955), received mixed reviews. Mailer, true to form, fought back. He designed a half-page ad for the Village Voice that read: "All over America, The Deer Park is getting nothing but RAVES." The ad went on to quote only the most damning reviews, a print equivalent of giving his critics the finger.

And some more:

In the '50s, New York Times Magazine editor Harvey Shapiro was in on the inception of The Village Voice. When asked his advice, Shapiro told colleague Mailer that his idea to publish a page of terrible reviews of Deer Park in the Voice was a silly gimmick that wouldn't work. "I was totally wrong," Shapiro later admitted. "It made him famous."

See a scan of this "silly gimmick" after the jump.

I Love the Smell of Fortune Cookies in the Morning

Your pal here had almost forgotten about this "quirk" piece courtesy Michael Hirschorn.  But now Ed "Brother, can you spare a dime?" Champion has reminded me about it.  Lovely.

Let's dispatch this one quickly, in two parts.

First, we have the easily debunked, tongue-in-cheek assertion:

David Byrne probably birthed contemporary quirk around 1985— halfway between his “Psycho Killer” beginnings with the Talking Heads and his move to global pop—when he sang the song “Stay Up Late”: “Cute, cute, little baby / Little pee-pee, little toes.” [...] Jon Cryer’s “Duckie” Dale in Pretty in Pink came a year later, and quirk was on its way.

And so we see that Mr. Hirschorn is not unfamiliar with the Fortune Cookie Manifesto.

This is a canny move, because though statements such as David Byrne probably birthed contemporary quirk around 1985 can't possibly be serious, our good fellow here is still using it as cornerstone of his argument.  This is meant to stun you and leave you defenseless long enough to stumble through his next 1,500 words or so without much protest.

But since we're in possession of a pocketful of counterexamples, I think we can dispense of this one in Q&A format:

Q: David Byrne probably birthed contemporary quirk around 1985— halfway between his “Psycho Killer” beginnings with the Talking Heads and his move to global pop—when he sang the song “Stay Up Late”: “Cute, cute, little baby / Little pee-pee, little toes.” (As it happens, Byrne appeared on July’s recent book tour.) Jon Cryer’s “Duckie” Dale in Pretty in Pink came a year later, and quirk was on its way.

A: Tiny Tim

(We would have also accepted Andy Kaufman.  But there are some lovely parting gifts for you...)

Of course, it wouldn't be trend piece heaven if there weren't Bonus Fortune Cookie Goodness:

Correctly deployed, quirk yields unexpected treasures, perhaps even finds new ways to unlock that hoary emotion called sentiment, banished from the mainstream American novel (at least the fashionable, well-regarded novel) since sometime before John Barth.

No well-regarded novels have contained sentiment since sometime in the 1960s.  That sounds about right to me.  Hey, someone call Oprah and ask what the hell she's been up to all this time.

Now, part two:

Hooked on Dildonics (Redux)

You know I wanted to go out this week on a note of unabashed positivity.  And you know I love the Ward Sixers.  But I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with them on the LongPen, I think.

In response to Matthew Tiffany's cry of fraud regarding the Doomsday Device, Ms. Ellis responds:

But who is being scammed? Maybe, possibly, those book collecters who want to believe that when they pay big bucks for a Signed First Edition the book was in contact with the venerable writer's very own personal fountain pen.

It's only a cheat if you think that the experience of the author *actually touching* your copy of her book has some kind of mystic value.

The work is all that REALLY matters. And what's so wonderful about the LongPen is that it nullifies the fetishization of the "autograph." When you get a LongPen autograph, you DO get to chat with the author on video (an experience that is somewhere in between getting a letter and an in-person visit) and you get a note in your book actually meant for you, in a reasonable facsimile of the author's handwriting. It's an experience at least as legitimate as mailing the book to the writer and getting an autograph that way, actually.

And Mr. Lennon?

Most people ask a writer for an autograph because they liked the reading or book, and want to commemorate their having talked with the author. I've asked for lots of autographs this way, and people generally seem happy to to provide them and say hello.

But every medium-sized city on up has at least one Weird Dude (always a dude) who has like multiple copies of your book, with acrylic wrappers on the dust jackets, and wants you to sign them all. "Just your name," they say, with a tiny bit of desperation. As if, should you write, "To Weird Dude, good luck with your search for a girlfriend! Best wishes, J. Robert Lennon," you would ruin everything.

And you would, because they are not trying to commemorate a pleasant human interaction. They don't give a crap about your book. They barely look at you, in fact! No, they're squirreling away your stuff in the unlikely event you become super famous, and then they'll get to make a huge profit selling the signed editions on eBay.

The Weird Dude really brings to light the whole problem with autographs...the fact that a story is ephemeral, and takes a different shape in every reader's mind, and that this is the entire point. That a story is a seed for the individual imagination. That the physical book is not the important thing--let alone one's contact with the author.

[...]

It isn't that Condalmo's wrong, per se, but he is missing the point that author autographs overall are just kind of pointless. And if you're as famous as Margaret Atwood, you could spend your whole damned life sitting at a pressboard buffet table gazing up in exhaustion at the Weird Dude, and why not make something that can obliterate that experience from your life?

Yes, I see their points. 

Today in Pictures

Kindly Native-American Woman Wins Nobel; Doesn't Give a Shit

Suave, 'Evil' Doppelganger Runs Up $158,000 Tab in Cristal, AXE Body Spray; 'Good' Twin Angry, Jealous

Wuzzah?

Props for Stephen Dixon...in Esquire?  Believe it, friends:

I'd argue instead that Tom Perrotta is engaged in a more complicated and paradoxical project, one well suited to a postliterary age. He's writing books for people who don't much like books -- satires for nice people, fuck books for prudes. The problem with this approach is that it's not really satire at all. It's situational comedy. Perrotta's not gunning for laughs so much as light chuckles, perfect for a compassionate and confident grin. But less good for readers who'd be better served checking out David Gates or Stephen Dixon or simply giving up on books altogether and going to the movies.

I hate to say it, but even with the Dixon mention aside, that's not half bad.

Fortune Cookie Manifestos

The Reading Experience's Dan Green highlighted the following from a Sven Birkerts-penned review the other day:

Every so often, who knows why, a new literary aesthetic announces itself - an approach, a tonality, a way of setting up scenes and characters that clearly has to do with how the authors, and those readers who embrace them, experience reality. If there is not progress in the arts, there is certainly change.

I first caught wind of what seemed to be a distinct - and unsettling - new literary take on things reading Donald Antrim's short novel, "Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World," and then I noted it soon after in work by writers like Ben Marcus, George Saunders, and Colson Whitehead. I'm sure they're not the only ones.

What struck me in all cases was the writers' way of staging reality. To begin with, they all deployed a style of affectlessness, even in presentation of moments when affect is ostensibly being expressed. This by itself dates back at least to Hemingway. What was different here was what felt like a carefully gauged disconnect between an action or event and emotion. I had an ongoing sense that something was "off," but a sense, too, that only a disappointingly dull reader would be looking for the old kinds of resonances. I would liken it to the black humor of decades past, except that it has a different edge; this tone seems occasioned not by the prospect of the Bomb so much as of a world permanently cut off from verities. Post-post-modern.

Dan continues by comparing it with the opening graf of a review from Michael Dirda:

Paul Theroux is something of a throwback. In an era when so many novelists jump up and down with tricks, verbal antics, shock and razzle-dazzle, all the while shouting -- like Baby Roo -- "Look at me, look at me," Theroux just gets on with telling a compelling story, with the smoothness of a confident professional. The Elephanta Suite is his 27th work of fiction. The man knows his business.

Now, everyone out there might be sick to death of this topic, but it fascinates me.  I see this mentality reflected all the time in literary criticism, and it never fails to baffle.  Hence, another post, this time in hopes of attaching a snappy name to the incidents of shallow engagement practiced by Mr. Birkerts and Mr. Dirda and their ilk.

For the nonce, I'll call these miscues Fortune Cookie Manifestos, considering they possess the textual and cognitive depth of the former while attempting to embody the grandeur and power of the latter.  (The ne plus ultra of the FCM style is found almost everywhere in Dale Peck and Brian Reynolds Myers; e.g., Peck's 102-word dismissal of non-realist literature from Faulkner to DeLillo:

"All I'm suggesting is that these writers (and their editors) see themselves as the heirs to a bankrupt tradition. A tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is Ulysses; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov; and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon's; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid — just plain stupid — tomes of DeLillo.")

Mr. Dirda is especially amusing here because he's selling Theroux's novel in the same way that local "Continuous Light Rock" stations sell their wares; that is, by promising you absolutely nothing challenging, shocking, complex, or, yes, novel.

I don't happen to agree with having my music sanitized, but I can see the utility of a station appropriate to play at work or that keeps one from having to explain to the ten-year-old in the backseat what a "Tip Drill" is.  But we're talking about a novel for private, adult consumption here.  Do we need Mr. Dirda to keep us safe from novels that might assault us with tricks, verbal antics, shock and razzle-dazzle?

What Mr. Birkerts and Mr. Dirda have in common in these passages is a need to take a shot across the bow of those authors who dare to stretch the bounds of, as Dirda has it, compelling story [and] the smoothness of a confident professional.

Now, again, I don't have anything against compelling story, smoothness, or confident professionalism--whatever that might look like a novelist.  (I do like it in a dentist, honestly).  And I'd just as soon leave critics such as Birkerts and Dirda alone as fisk them, except for the fact that they take cheap shots en route to making their overarching points, wallowing in antagonism and false dichotomy when it is not at all necessary.

So: story: good.  Cheap antagonism: bad.

Still with me?  Good. 

He Died For Your Sins, Behind Mickey Manor, Federal Blvd, Denver, CO

(See also: A Federal Case)