Category: Books

Flyboy Action Figure Come With Gasmask is Jim Munroe‘s first novel. Although I didn’t like it quite as much as Munroe’s subsequent novels Angry Young Spaceman and the brilliantEveryone In Silico, it’s still a pretty good read.
Flyboy is set among a group of 20-something not-quite-slackers (well, they are too counterculturally committed to just be slackers; they range from artists to political activists) in contemporary Toronto. Ryan, the narrator, a sensitive and somewhat socially awkward dude, has the power to turn himself into a fly (and back again). His girlfriend Cassandra, an ex-riot-grrl-punk-rocker single mom, is able to make objects disappear. (These occult powers are never explained; the protagonists don’t know why they have such special abilities, they simply find they have them, and figure out how to use them). Ryan and Cassandra decide to become “Superheroes for Social Justice,” using their powers to fight against sexism, rapacious corporations, and government oppression. The book alternates between humorous satire, naturalistic depiction of countercultural mores, coming-of-age anguish, and right-on action narrative (among other things). This mix of genres is what gives the book its charm; it’s low-key, modest, and unassuming, but it keeps on coming out with memorable scenes and passages you don’t expect.
My favorite passage is the one where the narrator turns into a bee (instead of a fly), and escapes human anguish for a while (but only a while) by getting absorbed into the calm rhythms of working for the hive. Munroe manages to endow such surreal flights as this one with the same matter-of-factness with which he describes the narrator and his housemates teasing one another with dumb, frat-boy insult humor.
Munroe is also politically committed without being pious, something I value quite highly.
Jim Munroe self-publishes all his fiction, and offers some of it (including Flyboy) for free download on his website as well. He’s managed to get widely read and noticed, without having recourse to the usual corporate channels: which is an ethical and political decision and stance on his part. He supports other writers and artists as well, through networking, organizing reading tours, and putting out CD-ROMs.
Risking oxymoron, I’m inclined to call Munroe a pragmatic utopian. He’s an idealist, who does his best to avoid the compromises that most of us find ourselves making time and time again; but rather than high-mindedly preaching his ideals, he finds ways to actually make them work.

I’ve long had an aversion to the prose of Henry James. (How I prefer his brother, “the adorable William James,” as Whitehead calls him). There is just something so smug about Henry James’ prose, creepy and self-congratulatory and fussy and self-important and filled with hideous phrases like “in fine,” and “I daresay,” and “she hung fire.”
I often think of Henry James as the polar opposite of Proust (who is my favorite author of all time). James is all about the subtle folds and crevices of consciousness, where Proust is about those aspects of our emotional life where consciousness fails to reach (like “involuntary memory”). James fetishizes a narrow, instrumental “intelligence”; Proust is all about the limitations and failures, and ultimately the irrelevance, of such an intelligence. James’ characters are always calculating, always jousting for advantage, always manipulating one another, while Proust tracks the movements of passion, for good and for ill, in generosity and in cruelty, that are beyond calculation. James and Proust are both snobs; but where James takes his snobbery complacently for granted, Proust subjects it to lacerating self-analysis. And so on.
But Nightspore has been after me for ages to read James’ little-known novel The Sacred Fount, and his recent post quoting Rebecca West’s hilarious description of the novel (she writes that James “records how a week-end visitor spends more intellectual force than Kant can have used on The Critique of Pure Reason in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people that it is among sparrows”) finally persuaded me to do so.
Well, I have to admit that The Sacred Fount really is quite something. It’s James’ parody (intentional or not, I’m not quite sure) and reductio ad absurdum of his entire aesthetic and method. Significantly, the novel features James’ only first-person narrator; and this very Jamesian narrator spends the entire novel discerning subtleties that simply aren’t there, ‘reading’ his fellows entirely incorrectly, congratulating himself for his own mistaken insights, and constructing a “theory” of human behavior that finally collapses into a black hole of irrelevance and inaccuracy (or collapses like a house of cards, to use one of the novel’s own metaphors). The ultra-subtle discernment of James’ prose turns out to be nothing but projection and interpretive paranoia; the novel’s seeming exploration of intersubjectivity is unmasked as a wishful solipsistic fantasy. Thus, the narrator goes to great lengths to describe to the reader his silent unspoken sympathy and commiseration with a ravaged woman, filled with desperation, at the end of her rope, her life blasted by passion, on the verge of total breakdown, courageously and beyond her own strength struggling to hold herself together only a few moments longer… only it turns out the woman is none of these things, but rather just a witty and skittish flirt.
What’s more, you can’t even say the narrator learns anything at the end, when the full extent of his folly is revealed to him. He sort of shrugs it off, admitting a kind of defeat, but with his faith in his own intelligence and discernment largely unshaken.
The entire content of the novel, including everything that makes any of the characters potentially interesting, is withdrawn at the end, leaving nothing but a void. The Sacred Fount is so wonderfully crazy and pointless a book, so extreme an exercise in style (albeit one that makes me cringe) devoid of any meaningful content, so dazzling a display of writing without any reason to write, an act of pure expression without anything whatsoever to express, that it won me over in spite of myself.

Tonight I went to a reading by the totally wonderful Kelly Link (whom I’ve written about before). It was part of the Clarion West speculative fiction series of readings this summer.
She read half of a story about zombies, and an animal shelter where dogs are put to sleep, and Canadians, and strange pajamas, and working retail at a 7-11 type store that’s open 24/7. It was melancholy, and sweet, and drily hilarious, and filled with all sorts of surprising, counter-intuitive leaps that nonetheless somehow made perfect sense.
Link is a writer so singular, and so acute, that she makes utterly irrelevant the usual distinctions between “genre” and “serious” writing, between storytelling and prose experimentation, between hard-headed actuality and fantasy or dreams.

Today’s New York Times Book Review illustrates perfectly what’s wrong with mainstream Anglo-American literary culture.
Exhibit One: the review of Julian Barnes’ new book of short stories. From what I’ve read of him, Barnes is a deeply unoriginal writer, utterly devoid of interesting ideas, with a humdrum style, and whose main stock in trade is to create kneejerk responses (through a judicious use of literary allusions) in order to reassure his highbrow readers that they are indeed reading Great Literature. He professes to love Flaubert, but his writing about Flaubert is distinguished only by its utter banality. And sure enough, the NYT Book Review says that his latest volume, “in ways both modest and grand, helps sustain a reader’s faith in literature.”
Exhibit Two:the review of David Foster Wallace’s new book of stories. The reviewer is quick to criticize Wallace’s “ostentatiously elongated, curiously bureaucratic, stubbornly overdetermined prose style” (translation: his sentences are too long). Now, I am not one of Wallace’s biggest admirers; his writing, though always provocative and interesting and hilarious, fails to entirely convince me. But, still, to criticize Wallace’s prose style! To object to the length and density of his sentences! If nothing else, Wallace is certainly a powerful and innovative stylist. He is doing something to and with the English language that deserves both notice and praise. His sentences are deeply pleasurable in their ornateness and richness of detail; and their twistings and turnings at once exacerbate and mock the hyperbolic meta-self-consciousness whose contradictions, necessities, and discomforts are Wallace’s real subject as a writer. Wallace’s prose style embodies thought and pushes at its limits; the drama of this style is the drama of postmodern irony and earnestness: a play of qualifications to the point of exhaustion, but also a manic, deeply comic energy. The reviewer clearly knows all this, but still he insists that… Wallace doesn’t have a heart! Which is sort of like criticizing Orson Welles for not being Steven Spielberg.
Exhibit Three: the review of the letters of Isaiah Berlin. Here, the reviewer freely admits that there are those of us who do not regard Berlin with reverence and affection. Me, I find him far too mealy-mouthed, as well as unbearably smug about his advocacy of moderation in all things. And I’m deeply suspicious of the way that he, like so many Cold War intellectuals, countenanced all sorts of vileness on the part of the “free world” because it was being done in opposition to the vileness of Stalinism (much as, today, Christopher Hitchens approves of Bush’s barbarities, because they are ostensibly being done in opposition to the very real barbarities of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein). But this objection evidently positions me, in the view of the NYT reviewer, as a member of “that species for which ‘anti-Communist’ is the harshest term of abuse (and which cannot be persuaded by any amount of evidence that it might have been quite a good thing to be anti).” I would have hoped that the end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union (one evil empire down, one to go) would have meant the end of such crass Manichaeanism as is evidenced by this reviewer’s anti-anti-anti-Communism. At least Berlin himself had the excuse that he was writing during the Cold War, which pushed thinkers of all positions into dualistic boxes. But such arguments have no excuse, and no point, today (unless the point is precisely to bully the unwilling into joining Bush’s so-called “coalition”).
All in all, these articles show the Times‘ instinctive adherence to an utterly anachronistic version of “literary culture,” and suggest its inability even to recognize anything that is vital or meaningful in Anglo-American culture (literary or otherwise) today.

This evening it was my pleasure to introduce a reading by Cory Doctorow, science fiction writer and activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Cory is in Seattle to visit Microsoft, and try to convince them to scrap Digital Rights Management. He read a segment from a recently-written, and not-yet-published, short story, and answered questions, which were mostly about his work for the EFF. It was a pleasure to hear Cory’s wry, yet impassioned, take on digital culture.

Lindsay Waters is the humanities editor at Harvard University Press, and his new book Enemies of Promise is a jeremiad about troubles in the world of academia and academic publishing. Waters says that too many academic books are being published, books that sell poorly for the most part, and that this situation is not sustainable either economically or intellectually.
Waters’ polemic is rather scattershot, and sometimes over-the-top rhetorically, but he makes a number of important points.
A lot of academic books get written, and then published, because they are necessary for tenure. If tenure weren’t so closely tied to publication, then this situation wouldn’t exist. This makes a great deal of sense to me; it’s often a waste of time and effort for a newly minted PhD to turn her/his dissertation into a first book, instead of moving on to a new project. (I was lucky that I had the time — partly because I was in limbo several years between finishing my PhD and getting my first job, and partly because I got generous time off as a junior professor — to write something new as my tenure book, and let my dissertation slip into deserved oblivion).
The requirement of a book for tenure is something of a bottleneck. It leads people to inflate good articles into lots-of-wasted-space books, which sell almost no copies. And in any case this way of doing things is not likely to remain sustainable, as university presses get underfunded and forced to cut back.
Waters recommends that faculties and tenure committees exercise more critical judgment when deliberating on tenure, instead of (in effect) offloading the work onto the university presses’ review processes. While this is admirable in principle, I am dubious as to whether it could actually be made to work. Less reliance on publication records would most likely mean, not more critical judgment, but more arbitrariness and more personal spite on the part of departments and tenure committees. Having an “objective” requirement for tenure, lame as it often is, protects professors from getting denied tenure simply because they are offbeat in their sensibilities, or insufficiently “collegial.”
So this is still a problem for which there is no good solution.
In the second half of his book, Waters makes some crucial points about the current hyper-professionalization of humanities departments and humanities publications. Junior scholars face “increasingly rigid norms for publication” (82). “The modern university takes the present organization of knowledge into separate disciplines, all those gated communities, as inevitable and as natural as the categories of niche-marketing. The blinkered professional who has become the norm is not an intellectual who reads promiscuously in the hope he or she might come upon a book that will change his or her life” (72). Instead, scholars are encouraged to master a very narrow field of study in depth, to embed him/herself in minutiae of the field, and above all, not to stray to other realms or make outside connections. The result is a “crisis of the monograph” (78), the waste of energy upon trivialities in specialist books that rehearse, but do not dare to step beyond, the prevailing focus of the author’s sub-discipline. Waters rightly excoriates Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, among others, as senior scholars who are responsible for this closing down of any broader intellectual discourse.
Though the media often mock academic writing in the humanities for being abstruse to the point of utter incommunicability, they generally blame “theory” or “cultural studies” or an abandonment of close reading and the traditional canon as the culprit. Waters rightly points out that, contrary to this picture, over-professionalized academic writing today is anything but theoretical and anything but anti-canonical. It may use theory words, but it refuses to think theoretically. (Fish and Rorty condemn theoretical thinking tout court). And it may discuss horror films or romance novels instead of Shakespeare or Dickens, but it narrows its focus in the same way that the worst old-fashioned scholarship of the canon did. Academic norms today make it hard to say anything new or interesting about either Shakespeare or Herschell Gordon Lewis.
There are all sorts of policing mechanisms that promote this hyperprofessionalization: tenure committees, to be sure, but also — quite notably — outside reviewers for academic presses. I can’t tell you how many stories I have heard of people whose writing was rejected by presses or journals because outside reviewers didn’t find it disciplinarily normative enough. (I have never published with Harvard University Press, but from what I can tell, it is far less guilty of this under Waters than are most other presses I know about).
Most importantly, the way we train graduate students is the main culprit in creating this situation.
Waters hits the nail on the head as regards the problem with academic discourse today, but I am not sure he provides any sort of solution. (Which is not really a criticism; obviously I don’t have any solutions either). At the end of the book, Waters praises silence; “it is possible to be a great thinker and not publish anything” (78), he writes, citing the obvious example of Socrates. Water urges scholars and critics to hold back, to publish less, to give their ideas more breathing space to develop.
This is a beautiful idealization, but I am not sure it is anything more than that. We don’t have anything like the Athenian agora today — unless it is the Internet, a possibility that Waters rejects.
I’d make a counter-suggestion: that rather than valuing silence, today’s critics learn to value writing. Most academic writing today is execrably written: something that goes along with being hyperprofessionalized. I don’t mean, of course, that academic writing should become as “transparent” as, say, articles in Newsweek or The New York Times. Great style means Proust or Faulkner or Pynchon, as well as late Beckett or Dashiell Hammett or Hunter Thompson. But the convoluted sentences of most academic discourse, filled with hyperspecialized qualifications and subordinate clauses, bespeak a mentality that sees written language as merely instrumental, merely a tool for getting certain pre-existing facts or ideas across. It ignores the importance of style, voice, mode of expression, affect, etc, in all of culture, popular as well as “high.” It’s particularly ironic, of course, that literature professors would view writing this way. But until academics think about writing style as well as content, we will never break through the wall of hyperprofessionalization.

I had the pleasure of hearing Bruce Sterling give a reading the other day. He was touring on behalf of his new novel, The Zenith Angle, which he explained was a “techno-thriller,” rather than science fiction. The excerpt he read was funny and charming, in its affectionate portrayal of the book’s uber-geek protagonist. (I suspect tech people will get off on it much more than the general reading public). But what was really great about the reading was Sterling’s off-the-cuff riffs, during his introduction and then again during the Q&A, on subjects ranging from security holes in Windows, to the origins of Western capitalism in the building of medieval cathedrals, to advice on how to become a writer, to the limitations the English language when it comes to talking about the future. I’ve liked some of Sterling’s books better than others, but as a commentator/performer/futurist/theorist, the man is a national treasure.

Laird Hunt’s The Impossibly is sort of like a Dashiel Hammett noir novel as written by mid-period Samuel Beckett. But maybe that description is unfair, since it sells short the novel’s originality. The unreliable narrator seems to work for some sort of spy or criminal organization. He kills people under its orders, sometimes fails in his missions and is punished, falls in love and then wonders if his beloved has betrayed him on behalf of the organization, gets old, tries to investigate his own death at the hands of the organization. Nothing is conclusive, of course. Hunt manages to perfectly weld the epistemological concerns of the detective/spy novel with those of experimental prose and post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. The gap between perception and conceptualization, or between gathering evidence and solving the mystery, is the same as that between rhetoric and meaning, or performative and constative, or affect and signification. The Impossibly produces the emotion (rather than the philosophical resolution) of all these gaps, as trains of thought are derailed and lead nowhere, aside from the experience of carrying them out, and as the tough-guy persona of American detective and spy fiction quietly implodes. A beautiful book.

Last night I had the pleasure of doing a reading together with my old friend Charles Altieri, at Richard Hugo House. This was the first in what is planned as an ongoing series of readings called “Critics as Performers,” sponsored by Subtext, which is a major resource for experimental writers in Seattle.
I’ve also been reading Altieri’s new book, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. It’s a smart and very useful and important book, which does the crucial work of taking on the cognitivists and analytic philosophers who misconstrue affect by subordinating it to moralizing concerns, and ultimately to the imperialism of Reason. That’s my language, not Altieri’s; part of what makes the book powerful and effective is that Altieri takes on the cognitivists on their own terms, and shows cogently how their subordination of imagination to reason and of aesthetics to ethics, together with their general hierarchizing of the mental faculties due to their privileging of cognition, and of normative ethical goals, utterly fails to account for the complexities and richness of affective experience.
Reading the cognitivists always infuriates me: but for reasons that I am unable to articulate, since my language and starting assumptions are so different from theirs. (All I can really say is that my 20-month-old daughter’s temper tantrums are at least as important an aspect of what makes her human as is her learning to speak and to grasp abstract concepts).
What Altieri does for me is to articulate those reasons, refuting the cognitivists at their own game and on their own grounds.
It’s all the more effective in that Altieri sidesteps carefully around Deleuze; though he shares with Deleuze a love for Spinoza. Deleuze does provide a clear alternative to normative, cognitivist accounts of things like affect and emotion; but I often fear that my own (and others’) recourse to Deleuze provides too easy a shortcut. Altieri doesn’t take this shortcut; it makes his book difficult going for me in places, but I am learning far more from it as a result.
The centerpiece of the book is Altieri’s critique of Martha Nussbaum’s recent book on the emotions. I will not even try to summarize Altieri’s argument; but only note that it comes down to Nussbaum’s inability to adequately understand and appreciate Proust (page 173). Altieri writes: “For Proust the role of imagination is not to establish norms [such as Nussbaum tries to do] but to develop passions and compassions that make predicates like ‘saner’ and ‘more responsive’ [much valued by Nussbaum] seem painfully inadequate.” The Proustian lesson — if we can even call it a lesson — is that affective intensities involve us in singular experiences that we cannot but value, but whose valuation cannot be reduced to any sort of ethical (generalizable) norms, even humane and humanistic ones. To say this is not to invoke some sort of pseudo-Nietzscheanism cruelty or inhumanism, but rather to respect and honor singularity, against all attempts to call it to “reason.” (I am selectively following Kant here; if the ethical is the universal, then the aesthetic is the absolutely singular that cannot be brought under any universal rule, and that we “judge” therefore entirely without grounds).
(I fear I’m losing coherence here; so I’d better stop, and instead go back and parse Altieri more carefully).

Marty Beckerman‘s Generation S.L.U.T.: A Brutal Feel-Up Session With Today’s Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace is actually not bad. Its naturalistic (apparently — no way I could really know) story of teen promiscuity, alienation, and suicide is fairly convincing and moving, its over-the-top satire is funny and pretty much on target, and its interpolated statistics, headlines, interviews, and autobiographical essays definitely intensify the effect, more because of the way they multiply and collage the text in McLuhanesque fashion, than because of their particular content.
All in all, as a satirist’s moralistic warning about the dangers of a generation growing up without love or passion, the novel is a bit compromised by its own enjoyment of all the scenes it describes (which range from drunken sex between 16-year-olds who don’t even know each others’ names to knockout drugs, gang bangs and date rape) — but if this is a failure in terms of the book’s moral intent, it is only to the good in terms of its artistic success. Beckerman clearly despises jocks, cheerleaders, and proto-frat boys, which is a good thing; but his own smartassitude isn’t as far from frat boy self-congratulatory humor as he might wish. Once again, something which compromises his message, and his clear intent, makes this a better book than it would be if he had carried through that intent unambiguously.
As for Marty Beckerman’s either being a genius or a fraud — he clearly wants us to think he’s one or the other — don’t believe the hype. I don’t buy it, or rather, I don’t think he is a skillful enough media manipulator to carry it off. On Beckerman’s own website, he links to this site, which denounces him as “The Jewish Antichrist”; of course this site is itself actually registered to Marty Beckerman. But the novel works precisely because it is quotidian rather than scandalous, and Beckerman’s attempt to gain some sort of extra cultural cachet by pretending to be scandalous is a dud.