You’ll Eventually Tire of the Rugby

When that happens, Galleycat has some New Zealand titles to add to your reading list.

 

A Sordid Confession

I just finished Chuck Klosterman’s latest book, IV. What’s worse, not only did I finish it, I invested a fair amount of time and resources in doing so, repeatedly checking for its appearance in the catalog of my local library, placing it on hold when it finally was available, checking (also repeatedly) to see how much time remained before the previous borrower would have to return it, even wondering aloud how it was possible to take over a month to read a Chuck Klosterman book (I can only assume this person left their bong on top of IV and lost track of it for six weeks or so). Finally it was my turn to check it out, so I paid my $1.50, tossed it in my backpack, and finished it over the course of the next day.

I guess this is sordid because Chuck Klosterman has reached a point in his career where New York Magazine would place him at BACKLASH on the Undulating Curve of Shifting Expectations, never to ascend again to the heights of BACKLASH TO THE BACKLASH. Despite the apparent existence of devoted MySpace handmaidens who want to have his babies, Klosterman has inspired hatred in a substantial sector of the taste-making journalistic public, from the highbrow to the lowbrow to the soi-dis(t)ant hipsters who adored him in the first place. And it’s not that their complaints fall on deaf ears (this one, in particular, seems more than warranted). However, until recently, I discounted most criticism of Klosterman, because a) much of it comes from writers who resent the relative unpopularity of their own work and b) Klosterman himself seems pretty honest about the nature of his, um, accomplishments. Here is, after all, a guy who is perfectly content to admit when he’s wrong, who characterizes his own work as “solipsistic,” “self-absorbed” and “just [about] things that are entertaining to myself,” and who recognizes the improbability of his rapid ascent to success, notwithstanding the fact that he spent eight years writing for local newspapers. In addition, there’s a generous amount of Midwestern snobbery in this criticism, the implication that referencing one’s background or pointing out its quirks and idiosyncrasies makes you a posturing fake — if you’re a member of the Great Unwashed Masses between New York and California, that is. Mark Ames takes issue with a passage from Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, in which Klosterman describes his college days at North Dakota as follows: “We would sit in the living room, drink a case of Busch beer, and throw the empty cans into the kitchen for no reason whatsoever, beyond the fact that it was the most overtly irresponsible way for any two people to live.” Ames seems to think that this is Klosterman pandering to the Manhattan quasi-intellectual elite, playing “the hick equivalent of an Oreo;” I think it’s a pretty accurate description of college life in the upper Midwest, far from any city of note. I mean, instead of empty cans of Busch in the kitchen, my roommates and I used to routinely find/leave cigarette butts on the floor. But far be it from Ames to accept that Klosterman is onto something, as silly and puerile as it may be.

And that’s why I enjoyed Klosterman’s writing. Sure, sometimes he was just wrong, and sometimes the his joint-in-one-hand, pen-in-other style of criticism showed its seams. His subject matter may have been inconsequential, self-absorbed, or just plain bad, but rarely did he wrap it up without displaying some genuine wit or unearthing an observation that was startling or fresh in some way. I wouldn’t have said it was anything deeper than “amusing,” but amusement is great in between bouts of Serious Reading. I also admired Klosterman’s seeming-unpretention about what he does (“Hey! I write about stuff I like and plus, I get paid for it! Sweet!”) as well as his ability to pinpoint what is fascinating about various kinds of dreck. In a culture that is full of it, surely this is a skill not without worth.

Until recently, that is. I started to feel uneasy during Killing Yourself To Live. We get it, Chuck, the ladies like you. You touched on that in your last book. Now, about the import of tragic sudden death on a musician’s career. . . . ? It seemed that Klosterman had misread the Venn diagram that guides his work, stumbling from the overlap of “things that are entertaining to a lot of people (even if they are embarrassed to admit it)” and “things that are entertaining to myself” into the unshaded wilds of “things that are entertaining (only) to myself.” The trademark funny was still there, but Killing Yourself to Live ended up being a sort of gross hookup manual from a Charlie Brown lookalike who took himself and his love life pretty seriously — seriously enough to write a book about it, at least.

And that’s where the problem arises. Part of Chuck Klosterman’s charm had previously been that he didn’t appear to care if you took him seriously or not. He was just a guy writing about KISS, and he loved KISS, and if you didn’t, fine, but he was going to make you laugh at least once before you finished the essay and said to yourself, “Sure, but KISS still sucks.” I’ll reference this sensibility as the slacker aesthetic (or alternately, the stoner aesthetic), and its success depends on both the reader’s perception of the writer’s investment in the material and the material itself . As long as the reader perceives the writer’s investment to be minimal and the subject matter to be random or beneath explication (“Hey, I just write what comes into my head about The Real World, and I barely even edit it“), then the results will always be serendipitously pleasant and the slacker aesthetic is upheld. But if the reader begins to suspect that the writer is actually committed to the subject matter — i.e. that he wants to be right about it or unearth something true or eloquent rather than just happen upon something amusing– or if the material has a priori value of its own, then the stakes are raised.

And now we come to IV, which is comprised almost exclusively of essays and interviews that were previously published elsewhere. As such, it doesn’t deviate substantially from the style of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, and is better for it. The interviews are solid, and many of the essays toe the slacker line with Klosterman’s characteristic sensibility – “Television,” an hour-by hour account of 24 hours spent watching VH1 Classic being an exemplar of the genre. However, there are two moments in IV that capture exactly what is unsettling about Chuck Klosterman, two instances in which he makes clear his desire to be taken seriously and to move beyond the slacker aesthetic.

In a sense IV is Klosterman’s heady foray into the Great Unknown, because the only piece in it that wasn’t previously published elsewhere is a short story called “You Tell Me.” Essentially then, IV is Klosterman’s debut fiction effort. “You Tell Me” is about a drug-abusing North Dakotan film critic named Jack who works for an Akron, Ohio newspaper. Most of the story relates Jack’s PCP-fueled reactions to the events of his workday. Klosterman writes in the introduction that some details in the story are “not-so-loosely autobiographical.” Ten four there, good buddy, as most devoted Klosterman readers will recognize that many, many of Jack’s habits are Chuck’s as well. Which is fine, notwithstanding Jack’s repeated references to himself as a “genius” or a “pretty awesome writer.”

What is not fine, and what sort of gives the game away for Klosterman later, is this mention of Dave Eggers, in a separate essay about the “pirate renaissance” we’re apparently enjoying of late: ” . . . perhaps most curious, post-ironic literary whiz kid Dave Eggers has opened a pirate store in San Francisco. I’m completely serious about this; it’s a store that sells authentic pirate paraphernalia (and also doubles as a grade-school tutoring center).” Am I wrong in detecting a fair amount of passive-aggressive snark in this comment?* Calling a 33 year-old Pulitzer-prize nominated author a “whiz kid” seems, well, infantilizing, and the interjection of “I’m completely serious about this” needlessly trivializes the center, whose admirable purpose is only referred to parenthetically. “Post-ironic” — sounds like someone else, doesn’t it? Oh yeah, Chuck Klosterman. At first, why Chuck Klosterman would have a beef with Dave Eggers is beyond comprehension, until we remember that yes, Klosterman is now also a writer of autobiographical fiction. But you wouldn’t think that Klosterman took his fiction seriously enough to consider Dave Eggers a rival, would you? This is Moment Number One, when all the references Klosterman has made to writing fiction in the past come to mind and you realize that yes, he kind of does.

Which in and of itself is not too slimey! The desire for one’s work, especially one’s creative work, to be taken seriously is not despicable at all. But once that’s clear, the writer has to do more than rely on first person experience and some droll drug anecdotes to make their point, because the writer is no longer working under the slacker/stoner aesthetic. They are invested in their writing.

But first person experience and blackout stories are all Klosterman has. This leads us to Moment Number 2, one of many and selected only because it is so representative. Klosterman is writing about his experience buying a complete outfit off of a Gap mannequin and wearing it, intact, the next day. (Oddly, he also wears it on the jacket of the book.) “I start walking to work, and I can tell that everything about my life is instantly reinvented. I feel like a mannequin. And this feeling is fascinating, because I have no idea how a mannequin is supposed to feel; without even trying, I’m instantaneously projecting my fictionalized assumption about how it feels to be an inanimate object onto myself.” What exactly does that mean, anyway? It sounds very apt, yet paradoxical, a bit perplexing. Well, it’s perplexing because Klosterman is using the word “fictionalized” incorrectly. It’s not a “fictionalized” assumption; the assumption hasn’t been made into a story.** Really, it’s just an assumption, Klosterman’s uninformed guess about what an object feels like. But using the word “fictionalized” makes the whole line of reasoning sound deep without actually expending too much effort describing it correctly (Don’t even get me started on the “instantaneously.”) It’s lazy and thoughtless. It’s Moment Two, and despite Klosterman’s palpable desire to be a Serious Writer of Real Ideas, there are many like it. For example: “Does it [wearing a mannequin's outfit] deconstruct one’s identity and reconstruct it as commentary?” No, Klosterman, I think it just shows that you know how to use the words “deconstruct,” “reconstruct,” and “identity.” Which is a good start, but it still means you’re a slacker. And I am too, but I’m not sticking up for Chuck Klosterman anymore.

* I may be, actually. It was a reading with Dave Eggers that ultimately landed Klosterman his Spin gig and second book deal, so surely he holds him in some degree of regard.
** Inasmuch as the events in this essay are supposed to have really taken place.

 

The Truth Hurts

Nothing makes me feel like more of a failure than returning an unread book to the library. Especially here, where I request most of my books online through interlibrary loan (at $1.50 per pop) and where the checkout period is 1 month, having to return a book before I’ve read it means both that I’ve wasted money ($1.50’s cheap, but it buys half of a happy hour drink at the Empire) and, more painfully, that I’ve deceived myself on some level about what I will, should, or can read. If you can’t read something in a month, it’s not for lack of time to do so.

Reading lists (via kottke.org) are in season now, and looking over a few, I thought how much more interesting unsuccessful reading lists are. Sort of like how the lies you tell about/to yourself end up being a lot more revealing than the things you say or believe are true, a failed reading list speaks to the person you wish you were, the ideas you gave up on, the intellectual rigors that you couldn’t stomach.

Today I returned:

The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. Global economics. Jesus, what was I thinking?

The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr. The memoir that started the memoir craze of the late 90s/early 00s. More nonfiction, plus, I don’t think I like books about Texas. This book was also a casualty of my total enthrallment to PopCo and then The Painted Veil.

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn. Yet another work of nonfiction, and another casualty — this time, to the Dickens seminar I was taking at the local university. When you have to read (or fake reading) 800 pages of Dickens a week, it breaks your will to read anything else. For this reason, I doubt I’d thrive in graduate school. See, these non-reading lists are revealing.

So that’s me, a non-fiction shirking middlebrow with pretensions to activism and academia.

Although that doesn’t cover the copy of Swann’s Way that’s been on my nightstand for four years.

 

(insert title here)

Remember when I used to write about books from time to time? Yeah, maybe I’ll do it again some day. Until then, I can do no better than to recommend The Books of My Numberless Dreams, especially her thoughts on Jane Eyre.

 

Mergers & Acquisitions

Much has been made already of Dana Vachon, blogger-cum-novelist, particularly of his floppy-haired, pocket-squared brand of good looks and charm. Much also has been made of:
a. his $650,000 advance
b. how infuriating it is and indicative of the state of publishing today that said advance went towards Dana Vachon/M&A rather than five Iowa grads/five other debut bildungromans
c. how unfortunate it is and indicative of the state of publishing today that said advance was squandered on yet another hot young trend-of-the-minute and not devoted to developing real talent and long-lasting careers
d. how unfair it is that sometimes people are wealthy and smart and handsome and from privileged backgrounds AND published novelists
e. how even though Vachon is a rich Westchester libertarian who worked at J. P. Morgan and can tell different brands of luxury loafers apart blindfolded or something, he’s not one of THOSE rich Westchester libertarians (here the word “affable” is generally used).

Not a lot has been made, however, of Mergers & Acquistions. Of course the book doesn’t go on sale until next week, so until then the sales figures justifying Riverhead’s huge advance and the reception, critical and popular, by the reading public remains a matter of speculation. However, this reader can totally see how Vachon’s 70-page proposal, in the heat of auction fever, blog-mania, and backed by an acclaimed superagent, reached a 650K asking price.

Depending, of course, on which 70 pages comprised the proposal. It’s true that Vachon can write, but being able to write (as many wiser than me have noted before) does not equal having anything to say. In the same vein, caricature can’t substitute for character, nor name-dropping (brand and otherwise) for style. Add a plot fueled only by its progenitor’s hot air, and the result is unfortunately a tired exercise in broad satire.

Indeed, some might excuse these flaws by pointing out that Mergers & Acquisitions is a satire. OK. But isn’t the most important element of satire the fact that the author’s in on the joke? I missed that part of M&A, and for all his Balthazar brunching and dinners at Le Bilboquet –plus let’s not forget the pocket squares — it’s safe to wonder whether Vachon missed it as well.

Satire or not, it’s for the worst that Jay McInerney is the current patron saint of these East Coast rich boy coming-of-age tales. If this surely-close-to-depletion vein is to be mined into perpetuity, perhaps aspiring writers can take their cues from F. Scott Fitzgerald instead. “[W]e expect too little of ourselves,” indeed.

 

My Money’s On Alentejo Blue

This year’s Tournament of Books is still happening over at The Morning News. My favorite has already (predictably, by Jessa Crispin) been eliminated. But be sure to go over and catch up on all the standings, especially tomorrow/Wednesday, when Mark Sarvas (infamous in these parts for baiting Emily on the subject of cats) will be weighing in on Firmin vs. The Road.

 

Bookish

• TMN’s 2007 Tournament of Books has begun (via Bookslut). I’ve read 2 1/2 of the candidates — didn’t make it through Brookland — and voted for my favorite today (sorry Jessa, it was The Emperor’s Children). Head on over and vote; having actually read the contenders is not required.
• And yes, I know it’s been a while, but I’m still planning on doing a Delinquent English Major post on Northanger Abbey. I’ve been trying to get my hands on some post-colonial theory and do it up right, but turns out no one outside of grad school cares about that stuff, and so it’s difficult to find the latest works of Gayatri Spivak at the local library. But you care, don’t you, dear readers? Stick around, it won’t be long.

 

Fake Nice

One of the reasons I’m pretty good at waitressing is that I am really good at being fake-nice. I am so good at being fake-nice, in fact, that many people think I am nice for real, and while they are not wrong, they’ve reached that conclusion through a flawed line of reasoning. However, my fake-niceness has its limits. By Sunday evening, when most people are refreshed and rested and in the best spirits they will be all week, I have been working double shifts for days on end and am exhausted and surly. My feet hurt; quite often my ass crack is chafed from walking quickly (and sweatily) for so many hours. If you’ve never had a chafed ass crack, then let me be the first to tell you, it is even worse than you might imagine. My face is tired from smiling so much and opening my eyes too widely. The sound of my own voice talking slowly and cheerfully in that dumbed-down tone one uses for asking people if they’d care for another coffee (similar to the “dealing with the crazy boss” tone of voice, as it turns out) makes me want to take a vow of silence. By Monday afternoon, I am fresh OUT of fake-nice, let alone nice-for-real. And that is why today, I am abandoning my normal nice-girl scruples and writing a mean-spirited blog post.
I figure if you are reading this, then you are either working on a national holiday (life is unfair!) or returning to work after a three-day weekend (life is cruel!). Either way, you can handle some vitriol.

Today’s subject is: Blogs You Hate Yet Can’t Stop Reading.

Continuing to frequent blogs you intrinsically can’t stand is the hate-fucking of the internet. You know you shouldn’t, you know it’s stupid, and it usually makes you feel worse afterwards. You don’t bookmark these blogs or add them to your RSS reader. But for some reason, you can’t stay away. For example: a friend confessed to reading the comments on Ultragrrl whenever she was having a bad day. She said it made her feel better about herself knowing there were so many utter idiots in the world. For similar reasons, I used to read Stephanie Klein. No matter how shitty I felt, it was comforting to realize that there was someone out there so completely self-absorbed, tasteless, and shallow that I looked like a fucking Nobel-prize winning supermodel by comparison. But now she has kids, and even my cold heart can’t summon up too much venom for someone who is taking care of preemies and is frankly really boring. So, for a while I’ve been looking for a blog to fill Greek Tragedy’s place.

I think I may have found it in The Elegant Variation. Sure, the books Mark Sarvas writes about are experimental, ground-breaking, high-quality, dripping with talent. But oh my god, the tone. Is it possible to be more condescending? Could you throw in a few additional obscure-yet-ostentatious markers of extremely good taste? Nothing too mainstream though; that wouldn’t do at all. And leave it to TEV to make a point of putting aside literary fiction in order to sing the praises of — wait for it — a coffee table book published by Princeton Architectural Press about Paris streetscapes. Yeah, real low-brow. Do I even need to mention that the author is working on a novel of his own? Of course, TEV is written in the horribly overused first-person plural. Nothing like tarting up your opinions in the royal “we” to make them seem grounded in something, somewhere. In short, everything I hate about the pretentious world of “literary” publishing is on full display in TEV. But, his reportage is accessible, thorough, and timely, so I keep reading. Sigh.

Which isn’t to say I’m not looking for a replacement. Leave the blogs you love to hate in the comments, and maybe I’ll find something I can feel good about loathing so much.

 

Three Things

• Do you read I, Asshole? Well, you should. I started with this and then all of a sudden it was three hours later and I had read most of her archive. SJ, like Heather Armstrong and Ayun Halliday, is a living, breathing, writing reassurance that one can have children without your brain and your identity squirting out of your vagina along with the baby. For that, and for growing up in a small town in Illinois (just like me!), I voted for SJ in this popularity contest that will potentially send her to BlogHer for free. Please read her stuff and consider doing the same. Bonus: if she wins, there may be a naked ass! On the internet, of all places!

• Maureen Dowd finally got out of the hair salon and decided that the timely thing to do was to write an article hating on chick lit. Since my thoughts on this are already known, I direct interested parties to the extensive coverage available on GalleyCat. A belated thought, however: why is it that the one fictional arena that consistently features economically independent and professionally successful women is also consistently denigrated and shoved into the “genre fiction” closet, hmmmmm? And why is it that chick lit is the only “acceptable” (while simultaneously being derided as “unrealistic”) format for fictionally enacting that sort of success?

• Speaking of economic independence and professional success, I was patrolling my alumni website today looking for potential targets with which to network (please imagine an eyeroll here) in hopes of finding a new job in a new city. I didn’t find anyone to train my sights on, but I did find someone who listed their occupation as “sinecure”. After looking it up, I immediately changed my occupation to “sinecure” as well. It’s something to strive for.

 

The Delinquent English Major: I Surrender

After three months and over $15.00 in library fines, I finally concede that The Magic Mountain got the best of me. I tried; I really did; it accompanied me on many road trips, at least one backcountry overnight hike (and an 850-pg hardcover is heavy), and to and fro on the bus many a day. But, when Remembrance of Things Past started looking like a light read in comparison, I knew it was time to admit defeat. Perhaps someday I will be interested in long novels about the nature of time, the chimera of history, and the beauty of philosophy, but judging by what I’ve actually read of late, it seems that my current interests are more along the lines of chick lit and books about cooking.

Don’t fret, though, I still want to help devoted DEM readers to fake their way through great works of literature at cocktail parties. There is a certain kind of girl who will sleep with you if you can manage to convince her you’ve read The Magic Mountain or Nausea and I wouldn’t want to stand in the way of that. (Also, that kind of girl is me.) So, I present the opinions of the amazon.com reading community to help you in your quest to get laid, at least with the plot summary part. And, inspired by said reviews, I also present you with actual one-star amazon reviews of novels that made Time’s Best Books list (via Emily). Just to show, you know, that you can’t trust the amazon community. Except for plot summaries.

In addition, here is the wisdom I gleaned from my 221-pg journey through The Magic Mountain.

A great many false ideas have been spread about the nature of boredom. It is generally believed that by filling time with things new and interesting, we can make it “pass,” by which we mean “shorten” it; monotony and emptiness, however, are said to weigh down and hinder its passage. . . . What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony — uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When one day is like every other, then all days are like one, and perfect homogeneity would make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling. Habit arises when our sense of time falls asleep, or at least, grows dull; and if the years of youth are experienced slowly, while the later years of life hurtle past at an ever-increasing speed, it must be habit that causes it. We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time — and thereby renew our sense of life itself.

I suppose it was worth it.

Next selection: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen