Redoubtable Gen X Aversion

Going against the grain in this moment of maximum self promotion by way of self expression is to glorify the small, imperfect, human-sized effacing gesture. The Midwestern shrug of who me? I’m no big deal. But also (the righteous rub of the matter) to be noticed for doing so, to be sought out for not consciously sticking out, having no logo, being an unbranded and illegible cow in a sea of cow-calf pairs whose flesh is still singed with their owner’s particularized emblem.

Afflicting hold: Peter Orner’s textual worlds

There is, I suppose, a kind of self-defeating mark to the task of praising a book about how affecting certain idiosyncratic short stories are to an idiosyncratic reader, who comes to the occasion entirely converted over to the cause of reading and obsessing over them. To a point where the experience of having read does not so much furnish the colors and textures of the world - the mental furniture and immense particulars of the minded creature that has to apprehend it - but is instead the lens through everything is filtered, the switch that determines in how wide an aperture it might be beholden.

I like Peter Orner. I like the fastidious way he champions what he likes, and how unfussy and uncomplicated he seems in the act of liking and championing and showing the underbelly and emotional timbre of his aesthetic commitments. I like watching him search for and activate the intellectual click that comes about in the midst of trying to sort why we merely like certain stories and why we are haunted and convicted by others.

Perhaps relatedly: i am unsure why I have been so reticent and lacked the courage to fly the flag of my own shadow. 2022 was like that, I guess.

A bon vivant kind of life

Axioms and apothegms make everyday thinking seem like it suffers from a kind of stutter. You might prefer maxims but we all have our pretensions. La Rouchefoucauld is who they summon in the seminar rooms. Rakim is who they rock in the streets. Pull a string taut and measure once, then make it a loop and measure again. Not that the mumble rappers could appreciate it, or the crank turners in tweed any better.

The inability to switch codes and follow each across the leap - the inability or unwillingness? - is a blinkering loss. Is it really the case thar 50% of people walk around without an inner monologue? When the doubting thomases shudder. It is good to be struck dumb and left with your bones reverberating in the wake of a coruscating insight. I am as close as I’ve ever been to solving the insomniac’s dilemma. Fail. Fail best. Forebear.

I sing to you my ineptitude and in exchange I deserve but do not demand sustained unremitting applause

I sing to you my ineptitude

and in exchange

you clamp down on happiness

trapped and squirming, but

signed and delivered, too.

in acceptance of what

i had wrought, clumsy as

swollen tongue

and as scintillating, maybe,

as dryer lint collected in the bottom

of a wire waste basket in the dark corner.

but true, squared away, with not even a nub of pretense

and above all, for no one else.

in acceptance, that core exchange,

you hand over your heart and

I am

without recourse, slayed.

which is why I deserve, but do not demand,

your unremitting and sustained applause.

color us both seduced.

yes, you. To you I sing.

Big in Kenya. Huge. Insatiable desire for this there.

A little Roman a clef of critical putsch:

I think autofiction’s problem is also the reason for its popularity, or the reason for its popularity among critics. Autofiction gets to the heart of why people read. Why do you sit on a train or a bus with a book? Are you pursuing knowledge, or self-knowledge, or are you using the book as a type of mating call, or as a sexual- or class-signifier? Autofiction answers the question of why people read in a very direct way: people read for sociology, or anthropology – people read to make comparisons, between their own lives and the life of the protagonist-writer, between the ways they’ve handled or not handled the issues of love and marriage and fidelity and money and child-having and child-rearing and so on, and the ways the protagonist-writer has handled or not handled same. It’s all just literacy-as-anxiety: how am I doing compared to how this published author is doing? How do I stack up? In that sense, autoficition combines the, in my opinion, deadly impulses of the religious and the bourgeois, in that it’s part Classical wisdom literature (how to live, how not to live), and part Victorian novel of “information” (providing data on how people – privileged people – dress, eat, have sex, and manage to pay for all of it). This depresses me. This need for guidance. This need for models. The constant craving and tracking of status that bespeaks an alienation from family and friends, that delicate but necessary democratic equilibrium of individual ambition and common culture. Autofiction is what comes after that: scorekeeping, a metric.

Deleuzian century says what?

Add sad in the wake of a cascade of calamities; so many first rodeos to come


insurance companies are going to make adjustments, and reinsurance companies are going to write (and pay out on) more policies. Poets are going to be called upon to consider what words are appropriate to capture the attention of an Audience that did not act when it knew it should and more than fair warning, as expressed and confirmed in multiple lines of evidence, of what havoc would wreak if It did not rise to the occasion. Wreckage is a new kind of bricolage. Add sad again and again.

That black dog, gone and died, or killed was it

From Big Les, in prose:

Every day, though, sometimes more than once a day, sometimes all day, a coppery taste in my mouth, which I termed intense insipidity, heralded a sense of helpless, bottomless misery in which I would lie curled in a foetal position on the sofa with tears leaking from my eyes, my brain boiling with a confusion of stuff not worth calling thought or imagery: it was more like shredded mental kelp marinaded in pure pain. During and after such attacks, I would be prostrate with inertia, as if all my energy had gone into a black hole.

Black dahlia, but with the Staccato of pecked keys and the whirring slide back to the left beginning again, once more aligned, we won’t know it solved until it tells us so.

Dieu me pardonnera; c’est son métier

On the bedside table:

local souls, Alan Garganus

collected stories, Amy hempel

the crossing, cormac mccarthy

the blue guitar, john banville

all that is, James salter

believing is seeing, Errol morris

Also: star of the heart by clarice lispector. Consider the possibility that Felicite and her parrot would be a boon companion as a read-along with this one.

Alas, the pulled heart string is not enough on its own, and neither is the head gone soupy for having been bashed up against a figurative wall by its own self’s intransigence. By bread alone we aren’t to live, even if we can and sometimes, in brief spells, do.

Donald Rumsfeld deserves a fact-facing vitriolic historicizing obit of the kind by which HST rendered Dick Nixon. An island of rats, feasting on each other. But not without joy, of course.

Also this

beware of your enemies, but above all beware of your enemies’ sons, for they will one day rule you.

Moving boxes. Things were always coming apart at the seams, was the kind of love they had snd suffered through, especially at the beginning. The suffering of love was easier to withstand than the work of marriage. Romantic suffering. Tiresome work. It was thought that newspapers would suffice but on a whim the expensive bubble wrap was ordered and added to the bill that the eponymous two guys and a van came calling for their fee. Which is when it hit home, in what her gym teacher - a living caricature (lesbian, softball) who proved how little caricature might capture a round character whose complications were in the flesh - called a teachable moment. She had moved out, and the move had cost her more than she knew. Could have ever possibly known. It’s not ideology or a thrumming internally coherent plot. It’s just a hum drum devastation of the life they had lived, the life-as-they-knew-it gone and become a conflagration across her history.

Fragments of Amy Hempel

If you’ve had your fill of prolegomenon and genealogies, of discursive and logical exegesis - if you no longer gain from elaborate figurative emblems of an argument’s structure, loops and transcendental deductions and language game absurdities, I do not blame you. I too have supped at that rich vein and been be bedeviled and bedazzled by its seeming suppleness, even as I grew pale and sickly, redolent of bologna, wearing scuffed and unpolished leather boots even in the summer, and incapable of making direct eye contact, even in my dreams. I am an enthusiast, but to fatigue I have succumbed. I am philosophical about my benumbed philosophical capacity. Still I encourage you . Have at it, I say. A more virulent strain is not a more deadly strain if the strategy is to contain rather than to treat, I say. Much of what I say is just saying what someone else once wrote down.

And as against that burned-out husk, that brittle desiccated commonplace book, I commend to you the rich tradition of the American short story, circa 1988-2010, including Barthelme’s ambling progeny and the whelped pups of Annie Proulx’s hard won Western grace. And I do so commend with a kind of stalking-horse idea at hand - that the short story that is not particularly invested in being “about” something, that sustains itself at the level of the sustenance and neither kvetches nor pines for leaving its readers’ nails bitten or heart a-palpitating, is but a taxonomic attenuation of the philosophic proposition-making mood, not a different species altogether. See for example Tumble Home, to which I have flipped at random in this collection of Hempel’s stories.

I am that overexposed light, that awkward angle, that angle of repose between the moldy but redoubtable Stegner oeuvre and the coiled kink of wayward but deep exploration that the certain class of Stegner fellows have kicked out over the decade and a half that marked three straight Republicans administrations and the onset of a Slick Willy era that is simultaneously more callow and more polished than what immediately preceded it.