At last,

a manifesto worth reading.

Enjoy.

"My, how he does go on..." click here for more

On the Passing of Mrs. Child

When someone famous passes, especially someone of a slower culture that is passing (see "Out of Time" series), the media usually misses the boat when they attempt to reduce that life to a sound bite. At the death of Julia Child, it may very well be the sheer force of her personality that prevented any mistakes in the obituary.

Anyone that knows me, knows that I have a pretty intense relationship with good food, one that occasionally elicits an annoyed but affectionate roll of the eyes from family and friends: "Geez Mike, do you have to ask the guy about the pizza dough? It's pizza, fer Pete's sake." However, as I read, see and hear the obits and stories about Mrs. Child I remember why I love cooking and eating well--because it's not really about the food.

Like most of us, Julia Child found her path quite by accident. It all started because she wanted to help the war effort and she thought (without any prompting) that the best way to go about it was to become a spy. How many people do you know that think they can be a f@#&ing spy? Yet as a typist for the OSS in France, she met her husband and the journey pretty much began from there.

Thus, when I curl up with someone's ditherings about the high gastronomic life, like Mrs. Child or the brilliant (and occasionally soused) M.F.K. Fisher, I remember that the author and I aren't really talking about eating. In the end, my burger-loving friends and family are right: food is just fuel. But good food is an effort, an act of love and life-affirming concentration. Take a basic requirement to keep your metabolic processes moving and turn it into art--an exclaimation that you are alive and glad of it.

I often wish I believed I could be a spy.
Bon Appetit, Julia.

"My, how he does go on..." click here for more

The Promised Finish to Out of Time #2

Note-- Thanks for your patience. Admittedly, this post was far too long and thus, some of the items mentioned in it date back to the 11 August entry. You might want to read it first. Then again, you might not.

Part Two (The Revenge)--They Shoot Writers, Don't They? >(an artsy side of the discussion, a distillation of Deconstruction and a brief defense of Dale Peck)

Thus, given that more writers are writing than ever before, and we're afforded the opportunity to sample their wares, what are the aesthetic reasons for not reading more good books theses days?

Reason #1 (note—Are you, dear reader, tired of keeping up with each entry's endless series of lists? So am I. I must find a way to stop doing this). Again, Reason for not reading good books #1: Books are boring. Okay, if you're taking time out of your aforementioned busy schedule to get to the end of this essay, you're probably not one of the people that would offer this reason, so I'll skip it. By the way, you're a mouth-breathing waffle waitress...

Reason #2: Many educated people take an active interest in the world around them, but they find most contemporary fiction to be depressing and/or silly, self-conscious and too based in technique to appeal to them. A cogent point. However, I would no sooner tell anyone what he or she should be reading than try to convince Molly Ivins that "compassionate conservatism” isn't an oxymoron. While this post may discuss the 'high v. low' fiction debate, I don't intend to assess the mental power of any reader. (You'll do that enough on your own, without my help. Yes, I saw you peeking at the cover of what that guy at the coffee shop was reading. Yes, I saw you make a face). However, there is something at the core of Reason #2 that is worth examining, i.e., the people that do try to tell you what to read and how to read it.

These people, called critics, can be divided into two subgroups. The first (okay...I know...another list), are academic critics. For many people, academics are the reason many won't crack another acclaimed novel again, the people who say to themselves, with conviction, I graduated from college so I wouldn't have to wade through a difficult novel again. Ever. And never have to hear someone speak of it as if they were explaining a new colorectal bypass procedure. If you, dear reader, are one of these people, you know that academic critics (and the professors that spend one weekend a year getting drunk and throwing up on them after sleeping with them at a conference) found you in the flower of your college youth and sucked the very life from books that you had been told, at the beginning of the semester, many people had actually enjoyed reading. These people are the assholes that take something as pure as the written word and reduce it to a mishmash of buzzwords and theory in sentences like this one:

"Rather, if [the author] is correct—that to examine systems of
oppression in text is to work inside their respective confinements,
this notion can be pressed beyond a textual exegesis of colonialism
and into gender/sexual and cultural boundaries."

Ouch. This guy took a novel that, trust me, hundreds of thousands have actually enjoyed reading and rendered it dead in a single sentence (made even more painful by the fact that I was the asshole that willingly put that sentence in a paper I'll be presenting in the spring. I'm sure you're all waiting with baited breath).

Yet, in spite of their soulless deficiencies, academia's ability to influence our culture at large is unmistakable. In 0.5 seconds (I love how much Google News likes to brag), I found nearly two hundred references in the media to the word ”deconstruction." References ranged from the mundane (building demolition) to some that rendered its rhetorical resiliency pretty damn near the breaking point ("...While the new album won’t see the street for a minute, you might be able to hear some new deconstruction of prog rock," he writes...Wait a minute. It's impossible to apply a theory to something that is utterly unlistenable). Maybe the general media's co-opting the word renders it less harmful to the world at large, maybe it they've gotten into our heads (college costs a lot, after all). Whatever it means, I leaves a bitter taste in a lot of people's mouths and contributes to Reason #2.

Aside—A quick response to the guy I heard on television months ago asking the question, "What is deconstruction anyway? Nobody can ever define it if you ask them."
Really? Ever talked to a person that was really, really into Jazz? Notice how they take a song and reduce it to a discussion of tempo and harmonics, thus rendering it a mathematical equation set to music? And then they discuss the emotional art of the tune? That's deconstruction.

Jackass.

Which takes us to our second group, the professional critics. While soul-sucking literary theory often pokes its head into a piece you might find in the New York Times Book Review (I will not post a link for those mercenary bastards at NYT), it doesn't really drive the bus. These gals (and guys) are simply in the business of telling you what they've read and whether they think it sucks. Or it's great.

You may roll your eyes at this modern notion of the critic, especially for creative writing (which probably isn't all that modern a notion; Marlowe was dissing Shakespeare in print in the Fourteenth Century), but they have a role. Unlike film critics, which I view simply as shills for the American Movie Machine, a good book review can enlarge your point-of-view and tangibly enlarge a writer's work, open your eyes to a context that you would never have found in a million years. A quality book review can help take you to the place that academics abandoned thirty years ago—a good argument about a book. In a bar. With your friends.

Which takes us, finally, to Mr. Peck.
Dale Peck is a book writer that is currently a hot topic amongst literati these days. Why? Because he's very, brutally, vigorously honest. In a mean way. Amongst those who still like to read, he is a meatasaurus. Rarely does he come away from reviewing someone's work without a hunk of their skin stuck in his bloody maw. He's a Peckasaurus Rex, if you will. No one, not even current sacred cows like Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon are safe from his wrath. Needless to say, this infusion of 'tude to the "art" of the book review has pissed a lot of people off. The normally sedate Stanley Crouch (a favorite Ken Burns talking head) even went so far as to punch him in the mouth after a particularly nasty review of his novel.

Well, Dale went and made a fateful mistake—he published a collection of some of these reviews and the result has been, well, frightening. The critics lined up to have their shot at Peck (remember they wrote books he's reviewed, too) and the assemblage resembled something much like the vision of the Pittsburgh High Wrestling Team seconds before they open the buffet at Sizzler.

However, there is only one review that caught my attention. In mid-July, long after all the others had taken their stabs at Peck, John Leonard took his shot. I single out Mr. Leonard because he is the antithesis of Peck. In essence, he is a veggiesaurus. I've been a fan of his since, well, I can't actually remember that far back. Even if he hates something (and he also reviews movies and television, too), he does not assault it. He sidles up and slowly chews his critical palm fronds instead. His reviews wash over you like an outdoor concert on a beautiful summer night. They are full of long lists of adjectives and metaphor for whatever is good or bad about his subject.
But his discussion of the appropriately titled Hatchet Jobs is missing such lists. It is instead a liturgy of those that Peck has wronged and a simple piece of advice for the young turk (in all caps): GET OVER YOURSELF. (Again, I won't link to this review because the New York Times will make you pay for it).

That's all fine and good, but Mr. Leonard, with ALL due respect, you're missing something: What if he's right? Not about everything, of course. He's wrong about DeLillo and Heidi Julavits , for one thing. He was wrong when he called Rick Moody "the worst writer of his generation" (that honor belongs to David Foster Wallace). He misses the point of the McSweeney's gag (sure, a little irony goes a long way, but what if an entire generation craves it like crack?).

What Dale Peck is not wrong about, however, is something that most of those who share John Leonard's views can't, and won't face—that there is something terribly wrong with Twenty-First Century fiction. In Hatchet Jobs, Peck confesses that he's a dinosaur. Not just an insincere apologist for being my eponymous meatasaurus, but a dino like me, too. He wants writers to return to something, though he has a hard time actually naming it. He claims his bile stems from a desire for writers to return to "something ineffible alchemical, mystical" in their work. A request for them to write to us, rather than at us, which many, many of them seem incapable of doing. Peck sees the postmodern writing on the wall and finds it terrifying. I may not appreciate his carnivorous manner, but I'll be damned if I don't agree with his excuse for it. For far too many of the literati's golden children, the ability to shock and confuse a reader is synonymous with good writing.

Nevertheless, there is no reason (in my view) that you shouldn't be reading something. For every Jonathan Franzen overkill there is the gentle brush of Alice Munro or the bright earnestness of Michael Chabon. The teenaged boy porn of Chuck Palahniuk is offset by the vertigo of Cormac McCarthy's border. There are Ha Jin's, Junot Diaz's and Tim Gautreaux's aplenty for the taking.

Too bad nobody's having any of it. Or is it really that tragic?

Fiction, like everything else around me, is evolving beyond me. I'll keep writing and reading and the world will speed by. Y'all wave if you think of it. See, that's the funny thing about Veggiesauruses and Meatasaurases. They meet on the savannah and tear each other to shreds all they want, but the big rock is coming and will fill the skies with ash and hot gas no matter how they stomp and gnash their teeth. Whether it is because technology has rendered another medium obsolete or the postmodern age has reduced belle lettres to a matter of critical x's and o's on a blackboard, extinction is on the way. Beat your chests and wear your hairshirts all you want, literature lovers, the big "E" I write of is looming just out of sight, just like the Quetzalquoatlus we visited so many words ago. But it's still a "biiig damn bird." Don't get me wrong, I truly believe we'll still be telling stories generations from now. I just wonder how.

Note-- If, in fact, you actually took the time to wade through more than two thousand words that meant absolutely nothing to your busy life (and hopefully laughed a little), then I must honestly thank you. Having bored myself with this particular rant, I offer you a small prize. Simply send an email with the subject line "I finished!" to ttubrd@hotmail.com with your address and I will promptly mail to you a token of my appreciation. It's crappy and cheap, but it's all yours. Bless your sleepy little heart. Oh, and there is one last installment in the "dinorants" coming in the next week. I trust you'll skip it, but I can't.

"My, how he does go on..." click here for more

Out of Time #2, or, Veggiesauruses v. Meatasaurases

The new dino exhibit at The Museum of Texas Tech lies in the dead center of the twenty-five-year-old complex in north Lubbock. The layout is angular and rambling, owed in part to the building's renovation for the visiting Vatican frescoes of two years ago. Because of this arrangement, it is hard to find an real sense of organization there, which might be appropriate, considering that the actual dino-"story" itself has few beginnings, middles or ends—paleontology has often been, after all, a morass of theory, conjecture and sometimes downright imagination. Visitors to the exhibit find themselves wandering from epoch to epoch, from big lizards to little birds (the oldest of which was discovered about forty-five minutes from where I'm writing this), from cooing of the size of nests of eggs to tapping the windows of some of the more unusual creatures depicted.

While centered around a depiction of a fifty-foot mother dino and her young following in her enormous muddy footprints ("no Godzilla, it was I who carried you..."), in a short time you realize that there is one particular item in the exhibit that garners a reaction from everyone that comes through, young and old. It's a skeleton of a twenty-five foot Quetzalquoatlus [sp?] suspended over the southern end of the complex. While the size of the bird (overheard during the last visit: "that's a biiiig damn bird!") is more than enough to garner a reaction, it is that the massive animal kinda sneaks up on you. The identifying plaque is hidden in the corner far away from either entrance and there is no arrow to take your gaze up (fine, I'll admit that I'm not smart enough to look up without an arrow). Thus, a visitor is smarter than I am and surveys their surroundings appropriately while looking at this plaque or they just happen to look up and see this big f@$%ing bird with a foot that could easily pick them up by the head and carry them home to feed the kiddies.

What then, does this enormous bird have to do with the inability to adjust my cultural bandwidth (which the "dino-rants" are really supposed to tackle, see previous)? Permit me another example of personal iconoclasm:

Example 3) On the Death of Fiction
Ohhh no, muses the reader of this weblog, Mike's defense of curmudeonology is going to a bad, dull and overwritten place. Bear with me for just a second friends, as The Man once asked his audience, there'll be more dick jokes later in the show.

The act of evaluating the terminal condition of prose has its two different areas of approach: the hard numbers (i.e, the economic and cultural realities of fiction's (lack of a) future), and the aesthetic (e.g, the Cassandric cries of 'industry' and academic critics on a slow, spiritual demise of the medium). I'll tackle both with as much brevity as I can muster.

Part One--They Shoot Readers, Don't They?(This being the part that comes first and alludes then that there will at least be another part following which will be connected thematically but will approach this rant from yet another vantage point)

The facts are indisputable—American publishers threw the largest party in history last year (indicated by the arrival of nearly 163 thousand titles hitting the shelves last year) and nobody came. In fact, partygoers (read, potential readers of this publishing avalanche) showed as much enthusiasm for the get together as did those invited to my get-together for the last episode of Charles in Charge.

How do I know everybody skipped the suaree (pronounced sua-REE)? In July, the National Endowment for the Arts published a report that concludes that less than half of adult Americans read for pleasure and the numbers are dropping exponentially by the year, to a total of 14 percent in the last ten years (Malcolm Jones summarized the NEA findings quite well in this article in Newsweek).

Now before you click off, fearing that I'll begin keening about the death of culture in our country, breathe a little easier. Instead, I venture that the NEA's numbers aren't all that surprising. They may not even be that awful a thing. After all, beyond our technological capability for infinite distraction, who among us has the time to read for pleasure? I've read more this year than probably any other time in my life, but I've been in college or unemployed for the whole year (and the "ml stephens Reading Challenge" has taken a genuine effort of attention, btw). Meanwhile, most of the people reading this have ninety-hour-a-week jobs, children with play dates and doctors appointments and NASCAR fantasy leagues. We're living in a world that isn't structured for sitting on the veranda with a leatherbound volume in our laps and the dog curled at our feet. And what of it? We made this world (including the "more-work-for-less-pay-and-no-benefits" reality of globalization) because we wanted it this way.

Then, what to say of this printing glut? Logically, publishing conglomerates had a normal reaction to their shrinking marketing base—that they haven't been offering enough choices for potential consumers, thus the increase in product. Some would argue that for each of the quality writers that finally found a home in this yard sale, there was an equal number of shitty ones, and they would probably be right (Alexandar Hemon has written a far better rant on this argument than I could ever conjure. Read it, it's good). However, I don't think that I'm going too far over the bend to comment that this economic model is flawed. By offering more product to an ever decreasing group of consumers, the industry is going to reap the same kind of net reward that I garnered at my New Coke booth at the local flea market. (Who knew?)

Much of what I'm talking about here is partially an answer to the fearful screeches of the Harold Blooms, Michael Medveds and Dale Pecks of the world. Like this chapter of the rants, their cries are also twofold: They too ask "why aren't you people reading?" Never mind that they ignore the answer: "Because we don't need to anymore, you dinosaurs." They ignore this answer because they're too busy asking the next, equally important question, "Why are you reading crap?" It's that alleged assault of crap and the courage to call it that that takes us to...Part Two (The Revenge)--They Shoot Writers, Don't They?(an artsy side of the discussion, a distillation of Deconstruction and a brief defense of Dale Peck), which can be found here

"My, how he does go on..." click here for more