Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me

Posted on by 007595

Pre-Reading Impressions

For a while, I was seeing a guy who really liked David Foster Wallace. He once forced me to do cocaine by shoving it inside me during sex. He wasn’t the first man to recommend Wallace, but he’s the last whose suggestion I pretended to consider. So while I’ve never read a book by Wallace, I’m preemptively uninterested in your opinion about it.

These recommendations from men have never inspired me to read Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest, or his essays, or stories, or even to take the path of least resistance and see the Jason Segel movie about him. Said recommendations have, however, festered over such a long period that they’ve mutated into deeply felt opinions about Wallace himself: namely, that he was an overly self-aware genius who needed a better editor and that I’d hate his writing.

Wallace-recommending men are ubiquitous enough to be their own in-joke. New York Magazine notes that “Wallace, too, has become lit-bro shorthand…some women [treat] ‘loves DFW’ as synonymous with ‘is one of those motherfuckers’” (hi, it’s me). When conservative Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch cited Wallace in a hearing, The New Republic asserted that “Wallace is the lingua franca of a certain subset of overeducated, usually wealthy, extremely self-serious (mostly) men.” Onion-esque news outlet Reductress clickbaited me perfectly with “Why I’m Waiting for The Right Man to Tell Me I Should Read ‘Infinite Jest.’” Wallace is on a list of books that literally all white men own.

Joking about this phenomenon, however, doesn’t make it stop.

Small, liberal arts colleges are spawning ground for Wallace fans; mine was no exception. The guys at my college — and this is not necessarily an attack on their characters — did many predictable things: played ultimate frisbee, rallied against multinational beverage corporations, listened to The Mountain Goats, and told me to read Infinite Jest.

The guys at my college did many predictable things: played ultimate frisbee, rallied against multinational beverage corporations, listened to The Mountain Goats, and told me to read Infinite Jest.

These guys persevere after graduation. A guy joked that you couldn’t live in Brooklyn unless you owned Infinite Jest. My longtime friend Nat told me Wallace’s writing was Faulkner-level good, Joyce-level good (“The Dead” is cool; I never got into Faulkner). A boyfriend lent me Consider the Lobster when I asked for non-fiction recs (I stopped reading after one essay). The cocaine guy.

But the first man to recommend Wallace to me was Robert Lanham, author of The Hipster Handbook, a caustic guide to early-2000s-Williamsburg-era culture that I picked up as a teenager in Virginia. I felt obliged to pay attention to a section titled “Hipster Literature: If You Haven’t Read These Works, At Least Pretend You Have,” where Infinite Jest appears between Haruki Murakami and Ben Marcus (the list is 93.5% male). “Actually, scratch this one,” Lanham concludes. “It’s too damn long. Hipsters just hear that it’s good. If they actually read it they’d see that Wallace is a poseur.” Despite this relatively sick burn, I wanted to know for myself. I wanted to become the right kind of person: savvy, culturally literate, respected by the metropolitan elite that might assume by default the cultural illiteracy of someone from Virginia.

For a long time, I’d respond to men’s Wallace recommendations with “he’s on my list,” or “I’ve been meaning to — totally.” And for a long time, I meant it. Now, thinking about becoming that kind of person makes me feel tired. This is how you become the right kind of person: if you’re not in a position of power, identify your oppressors — well-intentioned, oblivious, or otherwise — and love their art. This is why it’s hard to distinguish my reaction to Wallace from my reaction to patriarchy. This insistence that I read his work feels like yet another insistence that The Thing That’s Good Is The Thing Men Like.

Of course, I know female DFW fans. But when women have talked to me about Wallace, their commentary is usually “he’s funny,” or “I liked A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” It has never been “Go read Infinite Jest,” or “You haven’t read any of his work?” It should also be noted that, upon hearing about this essay, male Wallace fans have specifically listed women they know who like Wallace — as if this invalidates my disinterest somehow.

The men in my life who love Wallace also love legions of stylistically similar male writers I’m not interested in (Pynchon, DeLillo, Barth). I began checking out of literary conversations with them altogether. Now, when getting into book discussions with a certain kind of man, I often say “I can’t read” as soon as possible. This is a pretty transparent defense mechanism, but it works for me, sort of.

Here’s the thing: I don’t doubt that Wallace is a genius. And it’s not that I believe there’s no value in self-indulgent works by men. It’s just that I’m not very interested in them. These men seem to think I’m saying the thing they love is bad, when really I’m just saying I don’t care about the thing they love.

Sure, some of this is personal preference, a desire for relatability in my fiction: I may not want to read a book about a sad white man, but many of my favorite books are about sad white women (The House of Mirth, White Oleander, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Torn Skirt). My issue with many self-indulgent works by white men (the ones I’ve read, the ones I’ve given up on, and the ones I’ve refused to try) is not that I think they’re evil or poorly written or even, necessarily, offensive (though plenty of them are), but that I can’t find any entry point — and nothing incentivizes me to find one except other men’s approval.

Now, the male editor of this website has asked me to read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and write about it for money. This I can relate to.

Before I started, my boyfriend (who’s read everything Wallace has ever written, but has never recommended him to me) lifted the book off my bedside table. Flipping through, he laughed. “You’re going to hate this.”

Post-Reading Impressions

Reading these stories felt like being a tourist in the incubation tanks of other writers I know. I recognized narrative structures, stylistic idiosyncrasies, a detached anguish.

The book opens with a seventy-nine-word story called “A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life.” The title’s attempt at humor through grandiosity instinctively annoyed me, but I related to the narrative: a pathetic interaction between three desperate people hoping to be liked. Who wouldn’t relate? We all want to be the right kind of person.

The first story to really stick with me was “The Depressed Person.” “Wallace writes depression the way Jason Molina sings it,” my friend Nat wrote to me in 2012. “Hits too close to home, but is absolutely riveting.” As a story, “The Depressed Person” is deeply claustrophobic: I’ve never read anything that made me feel as inextricably trapped inside depression’s bell jar, including The Bell Jar. I had to take many breaks while reading this thirty-two-page story to replenish my own levels of sanity. I’ve dealt with depression, though never major, and I’d go so far as to say that this story is perfectly executed. I did not enjoy the experience of reading it, but neither have I enjoyed the experience of being depressed.

I did not enjoy the experience of reading it, but neither have I enjoyed the experience of being depressed.

With regard to this particular collection, the praise I’ve most often heard is that it’s funny. “Octet” was the only story to make me laugh out loud, in part because I hated it at first. The story is structured as a series of pop quizzes written in the second person featuring morally questionable vignettes that leave the reader to decide characters’ culpability (among other things). This follows another tedious piece called “Datum Centurio,” which traces the etymological history of the word “date” through an insufferable series of definitions from a 2096 dictionary. I felt equally bored by “Octet” until, fifteen pages in, I arrived at “Pop Quiz 9” (actually the fifth quiz). It begins, “You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer. You are attempting a cycle of very short belletristic fiction pieces…So you do an eight-part cycle of these little mortise-and-tenon pieces. And it ends up a total fiasco. Five of the eight pieces don’t work at all — meaning they don’t interrogate or palpate what you want them to, plus are too contrived or too cartoonish or too annoying or all three — and you have to toss them out.” For the first and only time while reading this collection, I laughed out loud. There’s nothing like feeling superior to a piece of writing only to have its author acknowledge exactly what’s annoying about the work, apologize for it, apologize for apologizing for it, and funnel along through the remaining sixteen pages in an adorably overwrought trainwreck of meta commentary (but then, you have to admit that this probably exists to win over more cynical readers [hi, it’s me]). Wallace indicates that he, too, wants to be the right kind of person.

The main thing to talk about is the series of titular stories. There are four sets of “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” each following an unnamed female narrator as she interviews shitty dudes. The types of repulsive interviewees are deeply familiar: pickup artists, breakup artists, rape apologists, men who pontificate on what women “really” want.

Honestly, I don’t think there’s much point in my writing about the text — it’s been written about enough (if you’re looking for an intelligent essay by a woman who loves Wallace, Zadie Smith’s “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace” is predictably wonderful). So I’m going to do one of the many things which, as a non-male writer, feels terrible, and I’m going to talk about my feelings.

It feels bad to read a book by a straight cis man about misogyny. It feels bad when this book contains some relatively graphic depictions of sexual assault. This is par for the course, when the course is reading books and the par is the Western canon. What feels worse is having this man’s work recommended to you, over and over, by men who have talked over you, talked down to you, coerced you into certain things, physically forced you into others, and devalued your opinion in ways too subtle to be worth explaining in an essay (as in the interviews, where the hideous men are the only characters we hear from). Either these Wallace-recommending men don’t realize that they’re the hideous men in question, or they think self-awareness is the best anyone could expect from them.

In the second iteration of “Brief Interviews,” one of the interviewees says, in explaining a rape victim’s revelation, “you can do anything to anybody or even to yourself if you want because who cares because what does it really matter because what are you anyway just this thing to shove a Jack Daniel’s bottle into, and who cares if it’s a bottle what difference does it make if it’s a dick or a fist or a plumber’s helper or this cane right here — what would it be like to be able to be like this?” The interview culminates in the subject saying to the unnamed female interviewer, “What if I did it to you? Right here? Raped you with a bottle? Do you think it’d make any difference? Why? What are you? How do you know? You don’t know shit.”

Wallace’s writing is effective in that it invokes both familiarity and repulsion. He knew what he was doing and did it very well. Many of the stories upset me. Many contained beautiful sentences. All were intelligent. I laughed once. But why have so many men been so insistent that I should read his work? What do they think Wallace has to teach me?

Why have so many men been so insistent that I should read his work? What do they think Wallace has to teach me?

Obviously work by women about sexual assault has received critical acclaim and attention (Morrison, Oates, Walker, to name a few). But men rarely recommend those books to me (excepting my dad, who gave me Morrison novels when I was a teenager), and as far as I can tell, men are far less likely to idolize those authors, aspire to their cultural status, or blatantly copy their stylistic idiosyncrasies. More mundanely, I’ve never heard a woman express shock or horror on hearing that a man has never read Beloved. It wouldn’t occur to most women to recommend books by women to men the way men recommend books by men to women.

I opened this essay with the cocaine story because exploiting my own physical experiences, especially sexual, establishes and theoretically validates my reflexive resentment toward Wallace (by way of his fans) before anyone has time to question me. It also encourages continued scrolling. Then I considered cutting the paragraph because I don’t necessarily want the internet to know that story. Now it does. Yet in either case, the choice was mine to make, and this is, of course, why it enrages me so much when men exploit women’s sexual suffering for Art.

It is enraging to have a straight man tell me a story about straight men telling stories to a woman about straight men acting like shitheads. I understand that this is the point of the text. I know. I understand that maybe other men wouldn’t absorb the message unless it was being told to them by another, probably smarter and better educated man. But then why do men keep recommending his work to me? BECAUSE I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW.

Let me condense Brief Interviews with Hideous Men to its most quintessential line: “Men mostly are shit, you’re right, heh heh.” Fine, Wallace: you’re right. Heh heh.

The Greatest Resurrections in Literature

Posted on by 007595

It’s one of our oldest stories: a return from the grave. As long as humanity is flesh-and-bone (until we upload to that great silicon cloud in the sky, that is), we’re going to challenge the old ashes-to-ashes adage and wonder whether there isn’t a chance of coming back for one more wondrous go.

What if the afterlife was just…more life? Priests aren’t the only ones who grapple with the question, and Easter isn’t the only time to dwell on it.

Throughout the ages, artists have imagined reversing the irreversible: a character, a beloved, a villain back from the dead. In literature, it’s one of the oldest devices around. A hero comes back, against the greatest odds of all, to save the day. But for every kingly lion or super wizard who breezily returns to life more powerful than before, our authors offer up a resurrection gone wrong: a decomposing corpse an embittered bride. And then sometimes life just carries on as it always has: the humdrum revival.

There’s no one vision of what it means to defy the Grim Reaper (Mot, Thanatos, King Yan, Mahweth, Azrail, Giltinė — an angel of many names). But what everyone seems to agree on is this: you can’t cross earthly boundaries without being irrevocably changed. Whether that’s a blessing or a curse depends on who’s doing the returning, and who’s doing the telling.

Here are eleven books that tackle that great question: could we come back?

(And for the record, yes, we understand this is a weird topic for a book list. That’s why we did it! No blasphemy intended. Hints of blaspheme, sure…)

1. Melquíades in One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez

Melquíades the gypsy floats in and out of this epic novel like the ghost he eventually becomes — introducing new technology (magnets! ice!) and narrating the Buendía family’s story. Thanks to Garcia Marquez’ genius, it doesn’t sound that strange at all when Melquíades reports (in the flesh) that he died in the sands of Singapore, not from a giant squid attack as some had claimed. It’s all part of the magic added to that old literary stalwart, realism.

2. Herbert White in The Monkey’s Paw, by W.W. Jacobs

Published in England in 1902, this short story by W. W. Jacobs combines elements of the Arabian Nights with Kipling’s tales of the British Raj. The story is also an allegory for the old advice: “be careful what you wish for.” The White family is struggling to get by when they are visited by their friend Sergeant-Major Morris, who recently returned from serving with the British Army in India. Morris has a magical object in his possession: a wish-granting, mummified monkey’s paw that has caused him nothing but trouble. Mr. White invokes the paw despite Morris’ warnings, and when he wishes for 200 pounds to pay off his house, the money comes by way of a reparation payment from his son’s untimely death at the factory. Mrs. White then wishes her son back to life, but the corpse who shows up at the door is so disgusting and half-rotted that they have to use their last wish to…well, you’ll find out.

3. Emma Wintertowne in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

Susanna Clarke’s epic novel imagines an alternative history of England where magic is just another long-forgotten art like hieroglyphics. Mr. Norrell is on a quest to revive the practice of magic, but it quickly intensifies from fun spells like moving statues or conjuring ships out of fog. When Norrell agrees to resurrect the recently deceased Emma Wintertowne, she comes back without her finger and is slowly driven insane.

4. Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis

Along with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis was a proud and well-known Christian, so it’s not that surprising that the king of Narnia is often read as an allegory for Jesus Christ. Aslan is a noble leader who sacrifices himself to save Edmund, an innocent. The morning after the White Witch kills Aslan, his giant lion body rises from the dead and he vanquishes his enemy.

5. Gandolf in The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

Tolkien also included a major resurrection in his famous series. In The Lord of the Rings, the wizard Gandalf dies on Zirak Zigil, only to come back to life as the even more powerful Gandalf the White. Thanks to Tolkien and Lewis, this trope — an important-and-wise character dies, then comes back to life — is now firmly-entrenched in the fantasy writer’s bag of tricks. Perhaps too much so.

6. John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens

Dickens’ last novel employs the old plot device of “resurrecting” a character who never actually died. In this case, a young man named John Harmon pretends to have drowned in the Thames so that he can gather more intel on his sudden inheritance and the man who accepts the money in his place — one adorably named, Mr. Boffins.

7. Juliet in Romeo & Juliet, by William Shakespeare

In Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare also makes use of the false death, but to much more devastating effect. After Juliet imbibes a liquid which makes her appear dead, she’s laid in the Capulet family crypt. Romeo doesn’t get the message that she’s only pretending, so he drinks a vial of poison to be with her. When Juliet wakes up to find Romeo dying, she stabs herself with his knife. Life before cell phones could be brutal.

8. Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling

During the ultimate showdown between Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort, Harry is injured and sent to limbo, which looks like a ghostly version of King’s Cross Station. Rowling has said that she wanted Harry to be forced to choose between life and death. Harry chooses life because he’s a hero and because really, who wants to be stuck in a train station for eternity?

9. Ligeia/Rowena in “Ligeia,” by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe published this haunting story in 1838. The story’s narrator is crushed when his beloved first wife, Ligeia, dies. He’s only partially recovered, in part thanks to using opium, when he marries his second wife, the blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine. One night Rowena is struck down by illness. When her corpse rises from her deathbed and walks into the middle of the room, the narrator realizes she has come back to life as his first wife Ligeia. That’s where the story ends, though we might assume the postscript is that the narrator, too, dies, from overdosing on opium at his wife’s bedside.

10. Jon Snow in A Dance with Dragons / (presumably) The Winds of Winter, by George R.R. Martin

As it stands, HBO’s “Game of Thrones” series has outpaced George R.R. Martin’s published novels. Martin killed off his hero, Jon Snow, in 2011, but he hasn’t yet published the next book in the series. However, Martin has confirmed that the general conclusions of his books will match the television show, meaning we can safely assume that the next installment of A Song of Ice and Fire will include Jon Snow coming back to life and kicking some traitorous Night’s Watch hide.

11. Aunt Bernie in Sea Oak, by George Saunders

Published in Saunders’ short story collection Pastoralia, this funny, weird, gory story is about consumerism and poverty in America — and more literally about a male stripper whose once-optimistic aunt comes back from the dead. Aunt Bernie’ s reanimated corpse is bitter yet determined to help her nephew prostitute himself into financial security and out of their crumbling apartment.

9 Memorable Visions of Alternate Today

On Our Nightstands: What Electric Lit Is Reading This Week

Posted on by 007595

From Kathleen Collins to John Crowley, here are the books our staff is currently enjoying

Beasts by John Crowley

I read a short John Crowley book published in 1976 called Beasts. Despite its brevity, it contains an awful lot, more than can be covered in this short paragraph. I suspect that in light of recent discussion pieces I’ll get in trouble for making this claim, but I would say it’s a dystopic, speculative novel that slips between sci-fi and fantasy. It considers a future U.S. after it has been divided into various territories. The country is controlled by a thinly veiled dictatorship, but in the outlying territories, there are various communist enclaves and eco settlements. Scientists have recently developed a genetically modified species known as leos that crosses humans with lions. That species is now fighting for its rights and survival from human hunters. There is one character, Reynard, who is a cross between a fox and a human, but he’s the only one and is, unlike the leos, very powerful with a high position in the government. For the most part, Beasts follows three main characters: a leo called Painter who’s on a vengeance mission, Reynard, and a falconer who leaves his bird tower for a job as caretaker to the ruler’s children. As you might imagine, there are a lot of ideas being tossed around, and sometimes the writing feels that way: a salad of genre tropes. At other times, though, the writing is beautiful and the scenes distilling. And considering the book was written in the ’70s, there are moments that feel prescient. I’m excited to read some of Crowley’s more recent and developed work.

— Lucie Shelly

High Art by Rubem Fonesca

As reported in my last update, I’m digging into more from Rubem Fonseca. This time it’s High Art, which so far reads like Cortázar by way of Raymond Chandler and ends the first chapter on the excellent line, rendered in English: “At times I have interpreted events and behavior. Am I not a lawyer professionally accustomed to the practice of hermeneutics?” Until further notice, I will continue reading Rubem Fonseca and only Rubem Fonseca.

— Dwyer Murphy

I’m reading Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins. The story behind this collection is fascinating and heartrending tale of under-recognized black female genius. Collins’s only feature film “Losing Ground” (1984) was “rediscovered” in 2015 and given its first official release at Lincoln Center, soon to be followed by this collection of story stories, written the decade before. The New Yorker describes it as, “a multidimensional revelation whose invisibility until now is as grievous a loss to literature as the near-disappearance of Losing Ground has been to the world of movies.”

The stories themselves are even more remarkable, each experimenting with different voices and styles. How’s this for an opening gambit: “I had an uncle who cried himself to sleep. Yes, it’s quite a true story and it ended badly. That is to say, one night he cried himself to death.”

I was recently lamenting with a colleague how white the MFA short story cannon is, with Cheever, O’Connor, Carver, and Munro as its patron saints. Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? was written during the MFA workshop heyday, and serves as a reminder that should be obvious, but is unfortunately still very much needed: that the whiteness of the short story cannon is not for lack of extraordinary writing by people of color. Kathleen Collins died of breast cancer at 46. If there’s an upside to her stories being posthumously published, albeit a small one, it’s that the stories benefit from being, presumably, untouched by an editor, who would have tried to turn them into something more traditional. They are deceptively humble; often short but never slight, and totally original.

— Halimah Marcus

Civic Memory, Feminist Future

Essaying the Vulnerable Self

Posted on by 007595

Already established as a poet with two published collections, Brian Blanchfield dives into the world of lyric prose with Proxies: Essays Near Knowing {a reckoning}. Part memoir and part intellectual discourse, this project draws on the writer’s academic background to enrich a web of deeply personal stories spanning from early childhood to the time of the essay collection’s composition.

What makes Proxies unique is that the source material is strictly memory-only: any information or references — whether a line from a poem or findings from a study once featured on NPR — must be something Blanchfield remembered in the writing process, without the aid of a search engine. The final essay, “Correction,” sets straight some of the details from the previous twenty-four.

In his preface, “[A Note],” Blanchfield lays out the productive constraints: that the essays will be “unresearched… analytic but nonacademic” and that he will “stay with the subject until it gives into an area of personal uneasiness, a site of vulnerability, and keep unpacking from there.” He refers to Montaigne asking his bookshelves the question, “Que sais-je?” (“what do I know?”) and decides that it “seems like a good start.”

Each essay unpacks a chosen topic — e.g. “On Foot Washing”; “On Confoundedness”; “On Peripersonal Space” — and each contains this refrain as its subtitle: Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source. Blanchfield is cracking open the lyric essay while also cracking open himself; half-remembered knowledge mingles with half-remembered lived experiences, and gradually, the poet himself emerges.

By queering the essay form in this way, Blanchfield also constructs a new way of looking at his own identities, where “self” and “other” are perpetually braiding into each other in a radical vulnerability. This vulnerability sometimes emerges in subtle ways, as in the essay “On Housesitting” —

Housesitting, like playing house, is identity rehearsal — practice, of course. For what? You’re writing a future into a present, you’re writing an other there onto the self here, and quote yourself back to yourself.

The displaced self, as house sitter, experiences a simultaneous gain and loss of control. I won’t spoil his anecdotes of housesitting mishaps.

In other moments, the braiding of “self” and “other” produces an unsubtle vulnerability, piercing and dangerous. The essay “On Frottage” reflects on Blanchfield’s coming of age as a gay man during the height of the AIDS crisis — “I never had a sex life without having a status” — and being part of the younger generation of gay men who, because of HIV risk and stigma, shunned the older generation and often exclusively explored non-penetrative sex. He writes, “What did we solve (a metaphysics, a phobia?) each time we made our mutuality exterior? We met each other there.” When HIV status is such a critical aspect of developing selfhood, interiority and exteriority take on whole new meanings. “On Frottage” is one of the most memorable and moving pieces in the collection.

The South Is Sufficiently Haunted

In the framework of Proxies, selfhood and identity are inextricably linked with memory and knowledge. Several other essays further explore queer identity through this lens, veering away from known narratives of “identity politics” in favor of a queer selfhood that centers relationships and vulnerability rather than structures of oppression. (Blanchfield’s relative privilege as a white member of the queer community grants him the ability to de-center oppression in his narrative; the failure to address this nuance is perhaps one of his shortcomings.)

The essay “On Containment” threads through different forms of this approach, wandering from place to place in the way lyric essays often do. First, we encounter a threat to literal bodily containment — a childhood memory of Blanchfield’s own exposed jawbone after a severe dog bite (vulnerability is wound-ability, after all); then, taking a step back, a meditation on the threshold of unbearable tickling —

It’s my recollection that the Winicottian psychologist and essayist Adam Phillips himself extrapolates broadly from his analysis of tickling; but, if not, the generality I have found so insightful is mine: beyond any fear is a great circumambient fear — a terror — that one will be insufficiently able to hold the fear. That if the stimulus is present and ongoing, unchecked, one might fall apart, come to pieces, in her faculties disintegrate. In sustained tickling we know (we learned) there exists an outer lip or membrane between the simpler immediate excitement of fear and the shameful and complete loss of bodily control and mental composure…

Then, from the topic of tickling, Blanchfield drifts into another kind of containment: the containment of one’s sexuality, always initially “secret” in a world that assumes heterosexuality unless told otherwise. But instead of the self being trapped inside of the secret (as with the common dialectic of “in the closet”/“out of the closet”) he makes another move, flipping the traditional narrative on its head —

Early on you have a secret. It is almost as if the secret is there before you. You are ever in relation to it; you are its container, and because by definition the one imperative is that you cannot share the secret — perhaps you develop the understanding that no one in your small world may be entrusted with the knowledge of what’s inside you — you become, through and through, a holding environment for the secret.

When Blanchfield takes the imagery of being “in the closet” and turns it literally inside-out, the relationship of the self to the outside world looks radically different.

The passages quoted above already provide an impression of the overall tone: a conversational intimacy intersects with a deeply analytical backbone. Blanchfield’s introductory claim to being “nonacademic” might be a stretch — anyone who frames his essays by quoting Montaigne in the original French can’t place his work entirely outside of academia. Though the essays are accessible for the most part, they do require a willingness on the part of the reader to interact with certain “Ivory Tower” greats, both canonical and obscure. He demonstrates a self-awareness of this quality in “On Confoundedness”: “One might even say [I am known as] a poet’s poet. Though less baffling the stronger I grow as a writer, my work is not especially welcoming to the uninitiated and one can feel excluded there…”

In Proxies, the self absorbs everything it touches. For a well-read person like Blanchfield, it seems that pulling from the likes of Sophocles and Barthes comes as naturally as drawing on his own childhood memories. Like his peer Maggie Nelson, he manages to integrate source material — from King Lear to Hart Crane — in a way that usually feels organic. In this endeavor, his “internet off” writing restriction may have been more beneficial than restrictive.

But why Proxies? Let’s return to Blanchfield’s preface:

A proxy in one sense is a position: a stand-in, an agent, an avatar, a functionary […] In sciences I think proxy additionally expresses a kind of concession to imprecision, a failure. It’s the word for a subject you choose to study to produce data that can approximate the data you’d get from the actual, desired subject, if it were not prohibitively hard to apprehend.

In a way, these twenty-four essays — and the twenty-fifth essay of corrections and amendments — are proxies for the self, the “desired subject” (or, sometimes, object) that cannot be directly examined or defined. Like the imperfect memories that circumscribe it, the individual self-as-writer must always be beholden to the changes of time. That’s part of what makes memoirs so interesting to read: memory becomes a character in itself, unfolding through the writing process. Here, Blanchfield’s memory-only restriction focalizes his own conceit, where memory serves as the foundation for the essays as well as the self. And, like many writers, the core of his memoir ends up being — surprise! — about writing and living as a writer.

The age of “fake news” has ushered in a new need to interrogate the different meanings of truth and truthfulness, and nonfiction writing outside the realm of journalism still has a role to play. The genre of “creative nonfiction” occupies a fascinating and ever-changing position in today’s literary culture; Blanchfield’s essays, simultaneously genuine and flawed, stand in as proxies for the examination of a genuine and flawed self. Like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, this collection demands a reader who can question different modes of truth and storytelling. Identity, memory, and trauma are never straightforward.

In “On Withdrawal,” Blanchfield begins by discussing his preference for facing backwards on trains. He writes, “I like the illusion of being drawn from the present into the future […] I have my eye on what I’ve left.” This “illusion” is fitting for the experience of reading his essays: the sensation of looking into the past yet being drawn ever forwards.

Ted Wilson Reviews the World: Orchestra Conductors

Posted on by 007595

★★☆☆☆ (2 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing orchestra conductors.

If you’ve ever been to an orchestra, or seen one in a cartoon, you’ve probably wondered who that guy is rudely standing with his back to the audience, waving his arms, and blocking your view of the musicians. He’s the conductor. Sometimes he’s a she, but very rarely. Men make up a disproportionately large number of existing conductors.

A lot of people wonder what conductors actually do. The truth is, no one really knows. Musicians can still play the music without a conductor, and frankly it seems like a distraction to have someone standing in front of you and waving their arms wildly, vying for your attention. “Hey look at me, look at me!” It’s a bit desperate.

I don’t begrudge the conductors having jobs. Everyone needs a job even if it’s just busy work, like a crossing guard or a doula. I just wish the conductors could do their job off to the side so I could see all the musicians.

And musicians shouldn’t be obligated to look at the conductor. It should be an optional thing. If they want to look at someone gesticulating wildly, there’s one over on the side of the stage. If not, go on about your business playing beautiful music.

Orchestra conductors should not to be confused with train conductors, who only wave their arms when they’re trying to warn someone to get out of the way of the train. If you ever see that happening, look down to make sure you’re not standing on train tracks.

I plan to get a job as a conductor, and for my first performance — right when it’s time for me to start waving my arms around — I’ll instead whip out a tiny folding chair from underneath my tuxedo, sit down, and let the orchestra do their thing while I sit back and watch from the best seat in the house with no one blocking my view.

BEST FEATURE: They wear tuxedos.
WORST FEATURE: They don’t even sing. If you’re going to stand in front of a bunch of musicians on a stage you should be singing.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing botox.

Five Disturbing Stories About Bunnies

An Adoption, A Suicide, An Investigation

Posted on by 007595

Patrick Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disturb the Peace introduces readers to Helen Moran, a woman who, upon learning of her adopted brother’s suicide, returns to her adoptive parent’s home to investigate the causes. With grim humor, Cottrell writes toward and around the experience of alienation — from identity, family, and society — and the unsolvable mystery of another person’s consciousness. When Cottrell’s singular character calls herself Sister Reliability, but proves to be anything but, it underscores the cognitive dissonance between what a first person narrator says and believes and what a reader understands.

Over email Cottrell and I talked about the allure of first person point of view, perceptions of mental illness, and the authorial choices she made in writing this novel.

Author Patrick Yumi Cottrell

Adalena Kavanagh: Your novel is in the first person, and though your protagonist gives herself the task of investigating her adoptive brother’s suicide, we learn much more about her interiority than the brother’s life and death. Why tell this story in first person? What is it about that perspective that you’re drawn to as a reader and writer?

Patrick Yumi Cottrell: I think first person narratives are seductive and neurotic. Writing this book was like being trapped inside a person’s mind. It was uncomfortable at times, but also necessary for this particular story. In a lot of ways, I didn’t know what I was doing. I figured it out as I wrote. The voice was my priority. I wanted it to flow easily, like a river going down the side of a mountain.

I don’t know why, but it’s always been difficult for me to write in third person. I like figuring out the particular texture and fabric of a narrator’s voice. For some reason, I associate third person with control and manipulation. I’m probably wrong about this, but that’s my sense at the moment.

Kavanagh: To press you a little bit, why was it necessary to tell this story in first person?

Cottrell: It was necessary in the sense that I wanted to follow this very particular voice that had arisen out of the confusion and murk of my life. The voice sounded strong to me. I wanted to follow it to see where it would go.

Kavanagh: Did any specific event or piece of art inspire you in crafting the voice? I ask because I can pinpoint certain ah-ha moments that completely change the trajectory of a piece. I like hearing those stories.

Cottrell: What inspired this book was not reading contemporary fiction for a couple years. And working full-time in Manhattan. And riding the F train into Manhattan at 5 in the morning. And walking around the West Village. I wouldn’t say there was one event or piece of art, but rather an accumulation of experiences. One piece of art that I do remember from the time of writing the book is the Sugar Sphinx by Kara Walker.

Kavanagh: You mentioned associating the third person perspective with “control and manipulation.” Do you mean omniscience? If so, I can see what you mean. That said, because your narrator is first person we’re forced to figure out how reliable she is (in as far as any person with varying degrees of self-awareness and self delusions can be said to be “reliable”). It took a while for me to understand that Helen is very straightforward, but her sense of reality might be compromised. You tease out some of the questions about Helen’s mental state without making clear what her mental state is. Why leave it open ended?

Cottrell: I think the word compromised assumes there’s some kind of truth that has been distorted. We all do that. Who is truly reliable? What is Truth? The thing is, I don’t think Helen is schizophrenic or bipolar. That’s something her brother writes about her, but how reliable is he? I don’t think anyone’s mental state as diagnosed by the DSM is pertinent to this story. I could have deleted that line about schizophrenia or whatever, but in the end, my editor and I made the choice to keep it, because it seems like something the brother would say. He enjoys throwing out suggestive crumbs as clues, but the crumbs don’t always lead anywhere. He’s an enigma. I believe Helen and her brother are both sane people, and resourceful in terms of how they deal with the world.

Kavanagh: Did you have any blocks while writing this?

Cottrell: I didn’t have any writing blocks, but I did take long periods of time away from the book. I was teaching at a charter school and that took up countless hours and days.

Also, I think at some point, I went down the wrong path for the book, and I had to delete a third of it. Or maybe it was half. Looking back, I don’t see this as an obstruction, but rather a moment of good fortune disguised as a crisis. That moment of uncertainty was clarifying in a way. I wasn’t sure I would be able to finish this book. I didn’t feel confident about it. But I knew I wanted to try.

Kavanagh: Would you mind expanding a bit on what the wrong path was?

Cottrell: I was writing more directly about Helen’s past experiences in New York City, for example, doing drugs in New York City with the troubled young people, but it was way too trippy and druggy, like a car filled with weed smoke and ecstasy and teenagers. This went on for a hundred pages. Writing those parts, I felt like I was on drugs, tripping. The narrative became unsteady, and I needed to bring it back to a place where Helen had more authority in terms of what she was saying. The drug section was too ephemeral. It wasn’t working at all. It was a dead end.

Kavanagh: I was struck by the narrator’s choice of referring to her adoptive parents and her adoptive brother as “adoptive.” This reminds the reader that the family dynamic is almost always influenced by the act of adoption. Was this conscious? If so, why?

Cottrell: It’s something that came about naturally. It’s part of her delivery. A few people have commented on it, like, “Oh she never lets you forget that she’s adopted.” That seems fine to me. Why should she let the reader forget she’s adopted? The repetition of the “adoptive” qualifier signals not only an estrangement from her family, but also an estrangement from her circumstances of existing in the world as a Korean adoptee.

Why should she let the reader forget she’s adopted?

Kavanagh: I found her references to her adoption both self-conscious but completely understandable (and maybe inevitable). I’m sure there are adoptees who don’t feel any sense of self-consciousness around adoption but I imagine it would be nearly impossible to forget, especially for transnational adoptees adopted into families of a different race.

At one point the narrator recalls a conversation she has with her adoptive brother (adopted from Korea, like the narrator, by white parents). They both talk about wanting to be white, and then the narrator says:

“We were nothing less than disappointed about being Asian and very ungrateful about being brought into this country, a country neither of us had asked to come into, and neither of us identified as Asian, we never checked the Asian box. If someone asked us our nationality, we usually said, adopted.”

This struck me as the core of the book, both for Helen and her adopted brother. It’s also a unique take on race, which for obvious reasons, people have much invested in, as self-identification, but also because in America it so often affects how you are seen, and treated. But in this passage you highlight that the internal parts of the experience of race are often cultural and situational. For two Asians raised by white Midwesterners who don’t make any accommodations for their adopted children’s birth culture, in place of the cultural experience of race, instead they have the experience of adoption.

I guess this resonated with me because if people asked me my race saying “mixed” feels most accurate, both as self-identification and as experience. I’ve talked to different mixed/and or biracial Asian writers and I was struck by their common determination not to write mixed/biracial characters because they feared their fiction being read as autobiographical. (I’m not sure why I was surprised to hear this — but I always figured that if someone thought my fiction was autobiographical that was their problem, not mine.)

As a Korean adoptee (and forgive me, I am not reducing you to those two identifiers) did you ever fear your novel would be seen as autobiographical? If so, how did you get beyond that? And if not, why not?

Cottrell: I never had that fear, strangely enough. I will say I dislike psychological and psychoanalytic interpretations, often those readings say more about the reader than anything in the book. There are elements of the book that overlap with my life in obvious ways, for example, as you point out, I am a Korean adoptee writing about other Korean adoptees, but the book is a work of imagination. Events, characters, places, etc. are all shaped and constructed deliberately. Reading is a private and subjective experience. If people read the book a particular way, that’s none of my business.

Kavanagh: By psychological and psychoanalytic interpretations do you mean psychological and psychoanalytic interpretations of the text or of the author (and her intentions) through the text? I think they’re two different things. I object to a psychoanalytic interpretation of an author through her text but I probably read text with a psychoanalytic lens — I’m interested in why people do what they do, and though flawed, I do think psychology can give us a way in.

So if not those critical lenses, (of text, and or author through text) which do you prefer to read through and be read through?

Cottrell: I mean psychological or psychoanalytic interpretations that dismiss the narrator as simply crazy, schizophrenic, bipolar, etc. I haven’t given much thought to those types of interpretations being applied to the author. I like readings that assume the death of the author (for example, deconstructive). The other way the book can be read is under a tree, or in a park, or in the midst of an argument with a loved one, or in the Walgreen’s parking lot.

Kavanagh: Helen sets out to solve the mystery of her adopted brother’s suicide and as much as you can ever understand such a personal decision, she does come to an understanding. What felt different for me as a reader was the fact that in many first person narratives (and in novels in general) we expect the narrator to come to a better understanding about their own interiority and life but you almost completely sidestep the epiphany model! She even says “If someone asked me to describe myself, I would say I was the adoptive sister who missed her adoptive brother’s funeral.” She doesn’t tell us how the experience has changed her, but she does reach a final acceptance of her brother’s suicide. The reader gets inside her head and comes to a fairly deep understanding of the narrator but the narrator herself lacks a certain sense of self-awareness, which strikes me as uncommon for a first person voice (it would be easy for a writer to unintentionally write a first person who is too self-aware).

Was Helen’s lack of self-awareness a conscious decision? And if so, did you have any models in mind?

Cottrell: I thought her confidence and lack of self-awareness was funny. I wouldn’t say it was a conscious decision, but that it came about naturally because of the person she is and her circumstances that could be considered destablizing. I like how she doesn’t question her actions. She feels strongly about what she’s doing. Many confident people lack self-awareness. Then there are the people who are very confident because they’re actually good at what they do, like Russell Westbrook or Ottessa Moshfegh. So it all depends.

Kavanagh: What are a few of your favorite first person novels or characters? What about them resonates with you or influenced your writing?

Cottrell: I like Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Humbert Humbert is such a monster, he ruins Lolita’s life, his self-awareness is only in service of himself, and he’s quite cruel, yet he can be charming, intelligent, and he seduces the reader into seeing things from his point of view, no matter how fucked up it is or distorted. Lolita is a work of cold genius. No one can touch it.

Kavanagh: Lastly, I want you to imagine a book not yet written but one that you desperately want to read. What is it? What does it do?

Cottrell: I want to read a book by Jesse Ball that channels W.G. Sebald. The fabric of this imaginary book would be incredibly fine and light. It would change me upon reading it.

Larissa Pham Will Reinvent Erotica

Five Disturbing Stories About Bunnies

Posted on by 007595

Easter is almost here, which means that children across the world will be hiding in their bedrooms, trembling in fear of the grotesquely large Easter Bunny — a frightening mythological monster as large as a man with hind legs able to crush human bones like matchsticks. This weird creature is said to stalk around houses, secreting “eggs” from its quasi-mammalian glands in hiding places for unlucky children to find.

Or something like that. It’s been a while since I went to church.

In any event, in anticipation of the Easter Bunny’s visit here are five of the most disturbing stories about bunnies:

“Stone Animals” by Kelly Link

Kelly Link’s wonderfully creepy short story “Stone Animals” isn’t just the best horror story about rabbits, it’s one of the best horror stories I’ve ever read period. (We published the story in Electric Lit’s Recommended Reading, which you can read here if you are a member.) The story centers around a family that moves out of the city into a house where everything is somehow a little off. The small disturbances grow more and more bizarre, and most of them center around rabbits that appear on the lawn:

In the other bed, Tilly was dreaming about rabbits. When she’d come home from school, she and Carleton had seen rabbits, sitting on the lawn as if they had kept watch over the house all the time that Tilly had been gone. In her dream they were still there.

General Woundwort in the animated adaptation

Watership Down by Richard Adams

Watership Down is probably the best-loved novel about rabbits, and for good reason. The adventure story is moving and filled with wonder, readable for children and adults alike. The story follows rabbits in a warren who are dying out without any female does. They end up struggling against a brutal militaristic rabbit warren run by a dictator bunny named General Woundwort. While hardly a horror story overall, there are plenty of frightening moments with Woundwort and his army.

At that moment, in the sunset on Watership Down, there was offered to General Woundwort the opportunity to show whether he was really the leader of vision and genius which he believed himself to be, or whether he was no more than a tyrant with the courage and cunning of a pirate. For one beat of his pulse the lame rabbit’s idea shone clearly before him. He grasped it and realized what it meant. The next, he had pushed it away from him.

From the film adaptation of Jesus’ Son

“Emergency” by Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson’s hallucinatory short novel-in-stories, Jesus’ Son, contains more memorable moments than most writers can fit into a career. It’s hard to say any of the stories stand out — they are simply all that good — but if push came to shove “Emergency” is probably the best. In that story, which features a man coming to a hospital with a knife in his eye (played by Denis Johnson himself in the film version), the narrator Fuckhead and fellow addict Georgie find a dead rabbit and slice it open, only to find it was pregnant:

Georgie came back to my side of the truck with his shirtfront stretched out in front of him as if he were carrying apples in it, or some such, but they were, in fact, slimy miniature bunnies.

Like most things that enter Fuckhead’s life, these slimy bunnies don’t make it out okay.

“Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” by Julio Cortázar

Rabbits are normally cute and furry, but not when you are vomiting them magically out of your mouth. In Cortázar’s bizarre and beautiful story, “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris,” a man writes to the woman he is house-sitting for while he vomits up rabbits:

When I think i’m about to vomit a rabbit I put two fingers down my throat like an open set of tongs, and I wait until I can feel the warm hair rising like the fizz of an alka-seltzer.

Despite the premise, this is not a whimsical story in the least. Like much of Cortázar’s work, it’s philosophical and ends on a dark note.

(I love this story so much that I once wrote a sequel where a rabbit vomits up tiny men.)

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

While the White Rabbit who leads Alice down the hole is the most famous bunny in Wonderland, he’s no match for the March Hare when it comes to the disturbing (or disturbed). The March Hare always thinks it is tea time because his friend the Mad Hatter “murdered the time” in a song:

The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, “It was the best butter, you know.”

Every Rule Is Made to Be Broken

Posted on by 007595

One of the things that writing teachers, and, increasingly, literary journal guidelines, warn writers against is this: Don’t, they say, ever, they say, write a story or novel about a writer. Worse, they say, is a story or novel about a writer writing about writing. The best stories and novels often break the rules, though, and this is the case with the original, astute debut novel, Oola, by Brittany Newell.

Newell is, frustratingly to this mid-twenties writer, only 21 and graduating from Stanford this spring. It’s also frustrating to know that many, if not all reviews, will mention this fact and possibly focus on it. It’s a shame, because whatever her age, Newell’s insight, intelligence, and prose are all clearly prodigious, which is obvious in her creation of this book, which is both subtle and outrageous, wonderfully readable yet philosophically challenging.

The novel opens with a short prologue chapter, followed by an odd scene, which Newell’s blog (she is a “drag queen” and performance artist who goes by the name Ratty St. John when not writing brilliant novels) suggests may be somewhat autobiographical (I only mention this because I was struck by how bizarre and specific the image in this scene was, and knowing there may be some personal experience with it allows me to feel that image all the deeper for its likely accuracy). In this scene, which takes up the whole of the second chapter, narrator Leif and titular Oola have made up a game. They gather in the living room of the house they’re house-sitting, wearing bits of clothing belonging to the house’s usual occupants. “Then, when she felt moved to, Oola would put a pair of nylon stockings on her head.” Quickly it becomes clear that the pantyhose are on Oola’s face:

Through the stretched fabric, her features were blurred, as if a left-hander had been penciling her, smudging the last stroke as he made the next. Her eyelashes were crimped, her nose squished, her mouth forced open, her cheeks Botoxed back.

Then Leif also wears the stockings, and they take turns until it turns light outside and the game stops with some embarrassment.

This scene, so early in the book, before we really know who Leif is, who Oola is, or what their relationship is, serves two purposes: one, it shows us these characters’ ability to act very, very weirdly, to enjoy it, and to be self-aware about their oddity. Two, it demonstrates a theme that will be present through the book: the blurring of the self, the other, and the perception of that difference.

In terms of plot, the book is quite simple. Leif is a WASP with wealthy parents who have wealthy friends who go out of town and need house-sitters, a perfect situation for Leif, who is traveling around Europe in an attempt to be a writer. Or maybe more accurately, he is attempting to become a writer through the tried and true method of being very privileged and traveling a lot and hoping that worldliness will lead to wisdom. Oola is a conservatory dropout, a pianist taking time off to wander around Europe and sow her wild oats (some more). The two meet, have amazing chemistry, start traveling together, sleeping together, and as far as we can tell, falling madly, deeply, truly in love with each other. Eventually, they end up in Big Sur, California, indefinitely living in a cabin belonging to a relative of Leif’s who’s gone, also indefinitely, into hospice care.

In Big Sur, Leif’s project, alluded to earlier in the book and which has clearly been developing in his mind for some time, starts in earnest. Leif is attempting to write a book about Oola — maybe and maybe not the book readers have in hand; it’s never made 100% clear whether we are reading Leif’s thoughts, his notes, or the finished product of his labors. Oola, by the way, has consented to this project, a fact that Leif sees as excusing everything he goes on to do. Her consent is in the first pages of the book, as if in order to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt; but her consent is flippant and flimsy, not the “firm and enthusiastic yes” we’re taught in consent workshops. On page 3 of the book, when the couple is climbing into bed to go to sleep, Leif announces that he is thinking of a new project in which Oola will either be the main character or the person on whom the main character will be based. The extent of Oola’s consent is this: “Me? Well, fuck, I’d read it. Guaranteed five-star rating. I turned the light out last night, by the way. So scoot, fatty.” I’d say that’s a half-hearted consent at best, but Leif takes it firmly, enthusiastically, and quite too far.

A Timely Investigation of Gaslighting and Accountability

In order to write the book about Oola, Leif is determined first to know his subject inside-out. He watches her closely from the very beginning of their — for lack of a better, more precise word — relationship. In Europe, he goes so far as to begin tallying the various ways men look at Oola, creating a point system and scale on which he places everything from casual glances to leers and beyond. She notices the fact that he’s watching how others watch her and gets frustrated by it. She, a tall blond American woman who knows, because she has always been told, that she is both beautiful and desireable, is well aware of how men look at her. Women in general are aware of this, and especially those who society has deemed particularly attractive. They have no choice by to notice, and learn to ignore, the male gaze. Leif, however, whom Newell imbues with a truly believable liberal male mindset (he apologizes for using the term “Indian summer” despite its un-PC-ness, for example) is paying attention to this phenomenon for the first time in his life in a concrete rather than abstract way.

But Leif doesn’t stop at watching those whose gazes eat up his beloved Oola. In Big Sur, he collects her orange peels, her toenail clippings, the hair caught in the shower drain. He learns to identify the names of the shades of makeup Oola wears, the fabrics her clothing is made of, the gestures she makes in each of her moods. He goes further, into a territory that is so rife with interpretive possibilities that the mind reels at trying to tally them all, but to discuss this in particular would be to ruin a big part of what the book’s climax is about, which I cannot, in good faith, bring myself to do.

In looser terms, it’s worth commenting on the themes Newell seems to be exploring in the book as a whole. One theme is love, the kind of love that can either destroy the self or the loved one, and sometimes both at the same time. It is the kind of love that is violent in its need to possess, even if the actions are not aggressive in the physical sense of harming another person — they are aggressive in the denial of personhood and selfhood to another human being instead. Another theme is male privilege, and how men, even in their deepest devotion, even enlightened, always have more power than even the most beautiful, goddess-like woman. Newell seems to be questioning that very notion of female beauty, how it can utterly destroy a person even though it gives her a kind of power and social cachet; beauty is so commodified, so absolutely beloved and worshipped in our society, that it can erase the person inside the meat suit that is her body. There is also a tricky and rather extensive and complex conversation about gender and gender performativity that is likely to emerge from many readings.

On a slightly personal note: I started this piece by mentioning how writers are supposed to never write about writers or writers writing; Newell, in breaking this unholy rule, besides writing a brilliant book, has also written some of the most resonant writerly truisms I’ve read in a long time. One such, that is so true as to make me want to weep with gratitude that someone has written it, is that “writers have a natural terror of the afternoon… This terror is least defined in the morning, when the world is hushed and manageable, the body limp and emptied, while the night at least promises morning’s return. The afternoon, on the other hand, is an armpit. One never knows what to do with it. Is it funny or neutral or a little bit sexy? It never feels quite right.”

The afternoon is indeed an armpit, and Britanny Newell’s prose is full of such witty moments that will make even the most skeptical reader yearn to love Leif — and, as mentioned, love can be very, very dangerous in Oola.

The Field of Dreams Approach: On Writing About Video Games

Posted on by 007595

Every year, more and more great essays are published on literary sites concerning video games. In the past year I’ve especially loved entries like Janet Frishberg’s “On Playing Games, Productivity, and Right Livelihood,” Joseph Spece’s “A Harvest of Ice,” and Adam Fleming Petty’s “The Spatial Poetics of Nintendo: Architecture, Dennis Cooper, and Video Games.” But for each great essay there are a handful of others written like apologies, seemingly perennial pleas to take video games seriously as a form of meaningful narrative.

I hoped to have a conversation with a writer about games that went a little deeper. There were two main reasons I turned to the Whiting Award-winning writer Tony Tulathimutte. The first was because of his response in an interview with Playboy, in which he said that his interest in gaming probably “had something to do with my desire to bend or break formal conventions in fiction.” The second was his three thousand word essay about Clash of Clans, “Clash Rules Everything Around Me,” which was exactly the type of essay about gaming I wanted to see more of. Tulathimutte is the author of Private Citizens, which we listed as one of the 25 best novels of 2016.

What I want is long-form literary criticism. But writers should just write what they want to read. The body of work will be there and the audience will follow it. The ‘Field of Dreams’ approach.

Graham Oliver: Can we have this conversation without getting stuck trying to legitimize video games as a medium?

Tony Tulathimutte: “Are video games art?” “Have we had the video game Citizen Kane yet?”

GO: That’s such a boring and overdone conversation. I think it’s more interesting to look at the ways in which video games actually do interact with literature, and not to hold the conversation just as a demonstration of our respect.

TT: Take the respect for granted and go from there. I thought about starting a literary magazine about video games a while back, but the discourse had by then become so toxic that, even with the most anodyne academic essay you could write, the best you could hope for was that it would be ignored. There needs to be more space for this kind of writing, but I just didn’t want to wade into it then. I feel a little better about it now, which is why I did the Clash of Clans essay.

GO: What is the difference between video game-related essays showing up on a literary site, versus a site where the primary purpose is the intersection of video games and literature? What could that site do that can’t be done (or isn’t being done) otherwise?

TT: Part of it is just volume. You can’t have a general interest magazine like the New Yorker covering video games to the same depth or degree as it does film or music or even theater. Every big magazine at this point covers video games occasionally — I know the New Yorker has written about Minecraft and No Man’s Sky, for instance. New York Magazine just did a big essay on gaming more broadly.

Gameplay still from ‘Clash of Clans’ (top), and footage from ‘No Man’s Sky’ (bottom)

But for some reason, there’s no video game editor at the New Yorker, no dedicated departments or verticals, except at newer places like VICE, Vox, The Verge. Unlike music or movies, video games aren’t equally distributed through the culture; it’s more compartmentalized. This owes in part to a marketing apparatus around games that caters to and fosters a specific audience, and because the audience for certain genres — responding to these pressures — became self-selecting, especially with respect to gender. Video games may be art, but they are also a STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics] industry, which makes them no different from any other STEM field in that regard.

GO: It’s a question of access. I was thinking about your Clash essay; you have this entire paragraph that has to explain this massively popular and mechanically fairly simple game. Does that automatically turn off an audience who are already proficient in those basics? In which case, are you only writing for people who don’t game? I suppose that’s another conundrum of coverage in a general interest publication…

TT: If you read an essay by Susan Sontag or Martin Amis about the great books, or by André Bazin about film, they can assume a certain level of knowledge about the text or film from their audience. I can write that way about games on my own time and my own dime, but there’s no presumed canon or general readership for games, because they’re not taught in schools and not regularly discussed in big publications. So you either write for the diehards — the equivalent of film buffs or bookworms — or for novices.

GO: Is that why we haven’t had novels which interact with video games the way David Foster Wallace did with tennis, or Ann Patchett with opera? Neither of their books included explanatory paragraphs; it’s so ingrained in our culture that it seems almost impossible to have grown up without some idea of what tennis or opera are.

TT: Most people have played a game, and the average gamer spends six hours a week playing them. I think it has less to do with the medium inherently than just the failure of writers who have approached the subject. I haven’t read everything on games, but so far, the fledgling efforts have been too literal or kind of corny. Some writers seem to think that you’re supposed to transpose the form of games into fiction — to provide this very lightly remediated experience of reading a book so that it feels like you’re playing a game.

The last thing you want to do is create a watered-down experience of gaming in a text. A book should still work as a book. It’s the usual difficulty of writing about other mediums; there’s that old chestnut that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. But there are special considerations for how to write about any form in a way that conveys deep presence and vividness comparable to the experience itself.

GO: When you’re writing about games in one form or another, do you find you prefer to write for someone who is like you — very interested in both writing and video games — or is your preference for someone in that liminal space somewhere between them?

TT: I approach it as I do with all my creative writing, which is to write for the audience of Tony. That frees to me to write things irrespective of their publishability. Right now I’m working on a long essay about Metal Gear Solid — the whole series. That’s between ten and twenty games, depending on which ones you call canon. The dialogue alone stacks up to something like sixty thousand words each. And the companion synopsis is almost three thousand words. I’m just trying to make points about the series that haven’t been made before. Would Kill Screen or The New York Review of Books ever run that? Hell to the fuck no.

Gameplay stills from across the Metal Gear Solid series

If writers keep doing this, eventually there will be a readership equipped to deal with it. For the longest time there have been really smart people playing video games and wondering where all the good criticism was. It’s a discoverability issue, to a certain extent. There’s so much good writing out there about games, but most games-writing outlets cater to fairly niche perspectives. Action Button is extremely good, irreverent creative criticism, probably my favorite. Five Out of Ten is academically oriented, Kill Screen is mainstream journalism. What I want is long-form literary criticism. But writers should just write what they want to read. The body of work will be there and the audience will follow it. The Field of Dreams approach.

GO: You said earlier (and you’ve also mentioned it in your Playboy interview) that the discourse around games is toxic and partisan. Are you talking about within or outside of the gaming community?

TT: All of it. Partisan lines have been drawn within it for purposes far beyond aesthetic disagreement. In part because so much of this discourse occurs in a medium where people are not held accountable for their words, i.e. on the internet.

GO: How does that compare to conversations within the literary community? You’ve written before, for instance, about the MFA vs. NYC debate.

TT: I want to do my part to de-estrange gaming discourse. Not de-stigmatize or demystify, but de-estrange. This cancerous shit happens everywhere — it just happens in a spectacularly aggressive and organized way in gaming.

GO: When you’re not actually writing about video games, what place do they hold in your life? Are they the stress relief at the end of the day, the reward after two hours of writing? Or something you try to avoid when you’re in the middle of a big project?

TT: I’ve played video games since I was three years old. I have loved video games a lot longer than I’ve loved literature — which is not to say more. Actually… yeah, probably more. It just so happens that I’m a writer. I don’t feel the guilt that some people do who, even if they enjoy gaming, approach it feeling as if it’s a waste of time, or a form of entertainment which takes them away from their “real life.” You wouldn’t condemn a cineaste or a lover of literature. But a fug of non-respectability still attends video games.

That said, the reward mechanisms in most games are designed to get you hooked in cognitive motivational ways that don’t apply to most literature. So it’s absolutely possible for games to displace other things that you would want to do just as much. I don’t struggle to fit them into my life, but I probably would, if my life consisted of much more than just teaching and writing.

GO: I suppose I was thinking more about the effect on your mental state. For instance, I have to save video games for the end of the day, because I have a hard time going from the almost meditative state of game-playing into writing. How does it fit in, not in the sense of time but in how it interacts with your ability to produce writing afterwards?

TT: If a visual narrative enters my head before I start writing, it’s enormously difficult to pull myself back into writing. A huge amount of psychic inertia has to be overcome to transition from consuming a narrative to assembling one. I have a lot of wacko bird theories as to why. Perhaps language is such an information-poor medium that it demands a sparseness of input, so that you can have room to envision or create new stuff in your head. Maybe the act of viewing, which puts you in the posture of evaluation and judgment, beefs up the inner critic that makes it hard to write. That’s all pure superstition, I have nothing to base that on.

GO: What about when it comes to the type of video game? You’ve mentioned playing DotA 2 in other interviews, which is very different from more narrative-heavy single player games. In the middle of a big writing project, do you find yourself drawn more to one type of game over another?

TT: With the caveat that writers are the worst self-appraisers, I’ll say that I have not noticed any influence from the type of games I’m playing on what I write. I think games engage an entirely different part of my brain, which might also account for the difficulty I have toggling between those two modes. That said, I think longer games can work like long books — immersively — where you have to pinch your nose and take a deep breath before plunging into the Neapolitan books and it just becomes the medium you swim in for months. Some games demand a higher or more frequent degree of engagement to get any kind of nuance at all. You can play a thousand hours of DotA 2, without coming anywhere near understanding it.

Gameplay still from ‘DotA 2’

GO: How does that compare to the relationship between reading and your own work? Do you avoid other people’s writing when working, or do you keep books on your desk for the sake of referencing them?

TT: I do. I try to keep a messy puddle of books around my work area, in case I want to steal something from somebody else. But I Google as much as I refer to other books. I don’t disconnect from the internet when I’m writing, like some writers who have this almost mystical anathema against technology. I generally find I benefit from my procrastination.

You can have a rom-com game, a campus game, an adultery game, or a boring-but-important game that will get taught in high schools circa 2110.

GO: You referred to language as being information-poor a minute ago, which reminds me of the AGNI essay you wrote on boredom. The thesis of that essay was basically that boredom in literature is okay. Can you also apply that idea to video games? Can there be meaningful or productive boredom while playing, through the act of repetition, for instance? I just played Her Story, which I know you enjoyed, and while it has a super interesting story you have to slog through a certain amount of repetition to get to it.

TT: The democratization of game creation is producing a wider range of games, like the Super 8 camera did with film. You can have vignette-style games like Nina Freeman’s — Cibele, how do you Do It?, Freshman Year, etc. You can have “walking simulators” that are almost purely meditative, like Gone Home, Firewatch, or Dear Esther. I just saw a piece on a game based on Thoreau’s Walden.

The impulses and tendencies that make people want to create literature are present. It will happen more as people are able to do what they want to do, without enormous corporate financial support or even crowdfunding, which, to an extent, just moves the bottom line to having to be crowd-pleasing. Games can be plenty boring in spite of themselves, even if that’s not what they’re trying to do. It’s a cliché by now to point out that the most time investment-heavy games like World of Warcraft consist largely of “grinding.” Or, if you play something like DotA 2, queuing for a game.

GO: For DotA 2 you also have to spend a lot of time reading up on viable builds. Work that’s not in actually playing the game.

TT: Yes, although I will say that that intellectual work doesn’t feel like tedious labor to me. I have fun looking up builds. The deep strategy and understanding are coextensive with the pleasure of playing the game.

Moments of boredom are built into games for reasons that range from comedy to suspense. I think a lot about the moment in Final Fantasy VI where you’re directed to just wait at the edge of a floating continent for a character to come along. On the one hand you’re sitting watching a clock tick down. On the other hand, it’s extremely tense.

Contrasting aesthetic effects in games to those in other media is not always productive, because it’s like playing Twenty Questions. Can games do X like books? Can games do Y like films? In the same way we should assume games are art, and that there’s an audience out there hungry to make something of them, we should assume that games can do anything. You can have a rom-com game, a campus game, an adultery game, or a boring-but-important game that will get taught in high schools circa 2110.

GO: I go to these academic conferences where a similar conversation is happening among professors who write in the field of gaming studies. Some bring in literary and film theory, and try to lay that on top of video games, while others reject that. The tools and the language are already there from other fields, so it seems easy. On the other hand, it can be kind of reductive, and perhaps prevents you from having the more meaningful conversation.

TT: Right, or even just the conversation you’re trying to have. There are also those efforts to create a language around game studies, partly I think try to legitimatize it in the eyes of the academy. You get people going on about the Ludologists versus the Narratologists, about ludonarrative dissonance, copping these quasi-academic terms. I can see the point of systematizing things, but my favorite criticism helps you not to just describe and understand, but to enjoy stuff more.

GO: How much do you worry about the effect that being an “out” gamer will have on your literary career?

TT: If I were bashful or coy about my love of video games I wouldn’t do this interview. The same goes for pornography or television. Even the language of being “out” implies a political and social pressure or an importance that just doesn’t exist. I’d hate to believe that being a writer means living in a constant state of deposition, publicizing everything you do, think, or feel. The fact that I like video games isn’t interesting. Video games are interesting. I love talking about them with smart people, both within and outside of gaming culture. But I’m also perfectly happy to be left alone with them.

GO: Do you hope there’s a day around the corner where a game developer decides to make a narrative-heavy game like Life is Strange, Her Story, or Kentucky Route Zero, and they look at a list of literary authors to figure out who should write it?

TT: Not at all. I believe that I can do a lot of things in writing, but I haven’t felt an urge to create a video game since the third grade. It’s always good to have some kind of interest that is totally pure, where you’re going to be an eternal fan, because sausage-making can disillusion you fast. If part of the charge of art comes from mystique or sheer baffled admiration, that’s something I want to preserve in at least a few departments of my life.

GO: As a writer, you’re expected to be both a creator and a thoughtful critic as well. It seems like once you publish a book, there is an expectation that you’ll be reviewing or blurbing for other books for the rest of your life. How does your approach to writing about literature differ from your essays on games?

TT: I review books as a practitioner; I know what goes into putting one together, so I can pan one that isn’t well-made. I write about games as an appreciator, in that I want to take something I like and enlarge people’s sense of pleasure or wonder at it. This doesn’t mean that I can’t be critical of a game. I have negative things to say about everything. But because I’m not highly qualified to trivialize or disparage a game on the level of craft — for instance, a sunbeam in a video game might look shitty and aliased because of technological or budgetary constraints that I’m not aware of — my main task is to study its narrative and to add value.

GO: You’ve been thinking about games critically for a long time. I read that you wrote your theses — both in undergrad and for your first master’s degree — on video game interaction. What were you looking at in those?

TT: I majored in something called Symbolic Systems, which would be called cognitive sciences anywhere else. They add linguistics and philosophy to the standard curriculum of formal logic, computer science, and cognitive psychology. I applied the extremely specific language of human-computer interaction studies to video games. So I wrote pretty dry literature surveys of game-writing and interaction theory, and how the latter could be applied to the former.

One was about game controller design, which ended up anticipating the Nintendo Wii controller by a couple of years. I talked about the potential for modular design and gestural input. The second thesis was about menus. They’re the basis of turn-based RPGs, and in games their definitional boundaries are weird. Take the Warp Zone Pipes in Super Mario Brothers. You go over a ceiling and drop into a room where you’re invited to select one of three pipes to go through. It is very clearly a menu, where you’re selecting one of three options, but it’s also a part of the action.

God, I sound so stoned when I talk about this.

Gameplay still from ‘Super Mario Bros.’

GO: I hate to keep mentioning Her Story, but I just started it today. In that game, the user interface also has this blurry boundary. You read a ReadMe file to learn how to use the system, but that’s all part of the in-game computer you interact with as part of the story.

TT: Yeah, it’s brilliant. Any computer interaction can be extrapolated into a game premise. Here it’s basically Database Search: The Game, but it’s fun and well written. To analogize with literature, there are plenty of stories whose premise comes from its formal conceit. My favorite is “Going for a Beer” by Robert Coover. He takes a simple sentence gimmick — where two things that happen at different times are written as though they’re simultaneous — and it becomes the conceit of the story. The story is, “what if your life was composed of moments with endings and beginnings but no middles?”

GO: Form matching content. That happens in all types of art, right? There was a piece on Hamilton which pointed out that, as the first half progresses, the Marquis de Lafayette’s rhymes get denser and faster, coinciding with him being in America and increasingly speaking English. The music reflects the plot.

TT: Form generating content, I would say. It’s a classical idea. Sometimes it’s done very explicitly, like with Oulipo. It can be super corny, but it’s a dependable source of inspiration.

It’s Tristram Shandy-levels of batshit.

GO: Going back to your idea for a game-writing website, were you imagining a place that just collected the kind of long-form writing you want to see, or were you also imagining a community that would be built around it?

TT: I am not too concerned with building community. The idea was simply to get critical essays on games­ — not fiction, poetry, reviews, or personal essays, but literary analysis. Like the essay I’m working on about the Metal Gear Solid series… So many of the male characters lose their hands and are sterile and have daddy issues and misinterpret the will of one female character, The Boss. Aside from the glaring Freudian overtones, what’s that about? This is not stuff that figures into the plot as it plays out, but is something that I think screams out for conversation.

GO: I was a Nintendo kid and then jumped to PC gaming, so I never got into the Metal Gear games.

TT: It’s like the Infinite Jest of games. As far as I know, it’s the longest continuous scripted narrative in games. You can make a strained case for things like Zelda or Metroid, but this is the most sustained vision from an auteurist figure, Hideo Kojima, and it’s just bonkers. It’s Tristram Shandy-levels of batshit.

GO: Well, that sells it. I now have to ask the big, speculative question, since you just called it the Infinite Jest of games. What do you think David Foster Wallace’s writing would have been like, had he been obsessed with video games rather than television?

TT: This question is so enormously counterfactual it might as well be a novel. The guy was hugely tech-avoidant. He typed with one finger on an old computer. But games seem very contiguous with his concerns in Infinite Jest. Though who’s to say Virginia Woolf wouldn’t have also gotten equally invested in games? Wallace is a gimme because of the technological overlap, but to me the more interesting speculative question is, What would a game written by P.G. Wodehouse be like? I want to see an essay on that.

How to Have Fun Destroying Yourself: An Interview with Tony Tulathimutte, Author of Private Citizens