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.