R. Scott Bakker's Blog, page 35

Aphorism of the Day: Particular people are narrow people precisely because they always know what they like. Accidents, guesses gone wrong, uneaten entrees: these are what make us whole.

Aphorism of the Day II: There's no better punchline than missing the punchline–unless you happen to be the punchline.

In a 1997 Charlie Rose interview, when asked about the hundreds of footnotes scattered through Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace claimed that he needed some way to disrupt the linearity of the text short of making it unreadable, that writing requires "some interplay between how difficult you make it for the reader and how seductive."

Like lovers and assholes (and reviews), books sort readers.[1] I would argue that books like Infinite Jest identify you–your affiliations, your beliefs and values, your politics–with the same degree of accuracy as monster truck rallies.[2] "When I was younger," David Foster Wallace explains in a 1996 interview with The Boston Phoenix, "I saw my relationship with the reader as a sort of sexual one. But now it seems more like a late-night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit stops and the masks come off." Books sort people the way conversations sort people: the talk you have with your mom on Saturday morning is not the talk you have with your boss on Friday afternoon, and certainly not the talk you have with your best buddies on Saturday night. All of our relationships have a conversational mode appropriate to them, a manner of communication tailored to the expectations our audience. We like to tell ourselves that we're 'just speaking our mind,' but in point of fact we're conserving/cultivating a certain kind of social persona, one intended to facilitate our various relationships: to make our mom proud, to impress our boss, and to crack up our buddies.

This is as true of novels as it is shooting the shit or obligatory familial phone-calls. A novel is, first and foremost, a mode of communication, a kind of relationship between a actual writer and a certain number of actual readers. And as with any communication, judgments concerning propriety will be inextricably bound to who is sending and who is receiving under what circumstances.[3] It makes no more sense reviewing a novel absent its particular communicative context than it does evaluating conversations with your mom, boss, or buddies. The success or failure of any human communication depends on the adequacy of the how and the what to the who–something which is especially true of modes that purport to challenge notions of adequacy.

This is the whole reason why publishers are keen to plaster testimonials on the cover of their books: to milk our authority and social proof biases. Infinite Jest is literally festooned with blurbs from a galaxy of authoritative sources: It arrives literally armoured in literary authority. We are told by a variety of serious people (who are taken very seriously by other serious people) that this is a seriously serious book. There can be little doubt that as far as the 1996 literary ingroup was concerned, Infinite Jest was a smashing communicative success.

Which should be no surprise. "I come to writing from a pretty hard-core, abstract place," Wallace explains in The Boston Phoenix interview. "It comes out of technical philosophy and continental European theory, and extreme avante-garde shit." Given who he was, and given he saw this as a conversation with good friends, and given that the seriously serious readers likely shared, as good friends often do, the bulk of his attitudes and aesthetic sensibilities, it's easy to see how this book became as successful as it did. Infinite Jest is the product of a ingroup sender communicating to other ingroup receivers: insofar as those other receivers loved it, you can say that as a communication Infinite Jest was a tremendous ingroup success.

The problem is that one can say the same about the Turner Diaries or Mein Kampf.

I don't pretend to know what literature is any metaphysical sense, but I do think that it has to have something to do with transcendence. What distinguishes literature from fiction in general is its ability to push beyond, beyond received dogmas, beyond comfort zones, and most importantly (because it indexes the possibility of the former two), beyond social ingroups. This is why communicative success and literary success are not one and the same thing. And this is also why outgroup readers generally find ingroup estimations of literary merit so unconvincing.

Make no mistake, Infinite Jest is a piece of genre fiction: something expressly written for a dedicated groups of readers possessing a relatively fixed set of expectations. It just so happens that this particular group of readers happen to command the cultural high ground when it comes to things linguistic and narrative. One of many cynical tidbits I came across pulling this 'review' together is how Little and Brown ultimately decided that the size of the book, some 1079 pages, would contribute to its sales by turning it into something that could be bragged about. As with any other 'elite' subgroup, literary practitioners are prone to self-identify according to perceived competencies, especially when those competencies dramatically exceed those of the hoi polloi. The most difficult missions are reserved for the special forces–those with specialized training–not the regular army. "I'm somebody who can't even own a TV anymore," Wallace confesses, "because I'll sit there slack-jawed and consume enormous amounts of what is, in terms of art, absolute shit."[3]

What we have here is a good old-fashioned authority gradient, one indexed according to a perceived hierarchy of difficulty. At the top stands, to use Wallace's phrase, 'extreme avante garde shit,' and at the bottom, 'absolute shit.' It is the ease of the latter that allows the difficulty of the former to so effectively sort individuals according to certain kinds of competencies. Of all the reviews of Infinite Jest I read, my favourite has to be Lisa Schwarzbaum's in Entertainment Weekly. In a truly wonderful piece of ironic prose, she admits defeat, "with one crabbed hand gripping the cover like a claw and the other raised like a limp white flag," deferring to the opinion of "more disciplined" reviewers with a culture-serf's eye-rolling genuflection, saying, in effect, 'Well, I can't read it so it must be a masterpiece.'

Schwarzbaum found herself sorted into the 'absolute shit' pile, "longing," as she puts it, "for an unedited Joan Collins manuscript." A true 'White Flagger,' to use the book's idiom. Even Bob Wake, the Wallace fan whose site has the best selection of reviews, puts scare-quotes around 'critic' when referring to her. Apparently she's not one of us–not really.

How could she be when the joke flew over her head?

But what if this isn't the case? What if Schwarzbaum, the superficial pseudo-critic, turned out to be the most perceptive of all? The most serious thing in Infinite Jest, after all, is the most silly thing: Entertainment. And surely Schwarzbaum–a reviewer for Entertainment Weekly no less–should be the acknowledged authority.

Which brings me, at elliptical last, to the book itself. This selfsame authority gradient, it turns out, comprises the very keel of Infinite Jest, and not just metaphorically. The story orbits two groups of people: the denizens of The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House at the bottom of some Bostonian hill, and the young residents of The Enfield Tennis Academy at the top. Where the bottom-dwellers struggle to regain the basic competencies of life, the top-dwellers struggle to master the competencies that will take them to the Show. Wallace's digressive style, which often numbed me with its mania for trivial detail, makes the book seem thoroughly postmodern at the outset, where scenes and characters arrive in fragmentary collages rather than organized according to traditional story-telling logic. But this turned out to be a kind of scale illusion: Wallace inundates you with so many details that the narrative arc is several hundred pages in shining through. Early in the book we are introduced to something called 'the Entertainment,' a video cartridge reminiscent of the old experiments allowing monkeys to directly self-stimulate their brain's pleasure centres: apparently it's so entertaining that it robs viewers of every desire except to continue watching. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the Entertainment is in fact a 'lost film' made by James Incandenza, the alcoholic founder of the Enfield Tennis Academy, either entitled Infinite Jest IV or Infinite Jest V.

Just about everybody (with the exception of poor old homodontic Mario) is looking for redemption. There's the Incandenza family, which has found itself imperfectly sutured around the suicide of James. The mother, Avril, whom others regard as unforgivably loving and attentive, and whose insatiable nocturnal sexual appetite looms like a peripheral shadow throughout the text. The oldest son, Orin, a pro-football kicker who is obsessed not so much with seducing married mothers, as ruining their capacity to find fulfilment with their husbands. The physically and intellectually disabled middle son, Mario, who oddly functions more as semiotic gap than as a character, and who was closest to James even though he is likely the incestuous child of Charles Tavis, Avril's half-brother and present administrator of Enfield. And the youngest son, Hal, a world ranked junior tennis player, who possesses a perfect lexical memory in addition to his father's strangely dissociated personality.

Then there's the Ennet House 'family,' which has found itself imperfectly sutured around their multiple addictions. Of these many characters, Don Gately is far and away the most prominent, a petty criminal and pharmaceutical narcotic addict, who has miraculously found himself first at Ennet House rather than prison after a botched burglary led to a homeowner's death. At first Gately's connection to the Incandenza clan is tenuous: he finds himself in Ennet (initially as a resident, then as an employee) rather than prison because the dead homeowner, who was Quebecois, was believed to be related to the Entertainment by federal investigators. Eventually, however, he begins falling in love with a new resident, a recovering crack addict named Joelle van Dyne, who, aside from being the radio personality known as Madame Psychosis, is Orin Incandenza's former girlfriend, as well as confidante of Orin's father James–the principle actor in, you guessed it, Infinite Jest.

The world of Infinite Jest is secondary–a caricature, a representation of our world with certain problematic processes, personages, and institutions ontologically exaggerated (in a manner commensurate to their significance)–much like the maps you find at amusement parks. He depicts a faux near-future dominated by the politics of 'experialism,' the need to divest power and territory in order to eschew responsibility for the phantasmagorical wastelands produced by the book's primary novum, annular fusion, which generates waste products (transported via skyline-dominating catapults) that destroys organic life only to spur monstrous regrowth. A kind of binary logic dominates Wallace's humourous worldmaking: the wasteland, the Great Concavity (formerly known as New England), is home to monstrous hamsters and gigantic feral infants. And Canadians, who seem to be concentrated in frightening high-crime ghettos (intimidating decent Americans with their beards, suspenders, and flannel), constitute America's greatest terrorist threat, none moreso than the dreaded Wheelchair Assassins, an Extreme Quebecois Separatist movement who hopes to use the Entertainment to so damage the United States that Canada will be forced to expel Quebec from Confederation to save face.

To be honest, I found most of these gags too whimsical to be all that funny, especially given the tragic backlighting. Reality is a function of detail: the information lavished on narcotics and pharmaceuticals, for instance, anchors what is a bloated, cartoonish future to what is a relentlessly miserable here and now. At so many turns I had the sense that the absurdity of his world wasn't so much a critique of our world as a description, as if his illuminating disproportions were calling attention to a lunacies that Wallace thinks we cannot avoid.

Another place where I found myself out of step with the apparent critical consensus is Wallace's portrayal of drugs and addiction. Although many of these sections contain some of his most penetrating and beautiful prose–particularly his (borrowed, I'm told) analysis of AA as a form of anarchic fascism–I found myself bumping into artifice at least as regularly as profundity. Perhaps because of my own history, I really had the sense of a 33 year-old possessing personal–but ultimately passing–familiarity with addiction and addiction problems trying to be raw and authentic. I was also troubled by what struck me as a sordid voyeurism: at times Wallace seems to wallow in the miserable life stories of various addicts for the sake of… [substitute rarified rationale here]. More and more, it seemed to be a kind of 'loser porn,' almost as if the systematic (and quite interesting) suppression of sexuality in the book ('fucking' is typically referred to as 'X-ing') needed to be systematically released in gratuitous descriptions of drug-related abjection. Instead of grinding orange bodies we get convulsing grey ones.

One of the greater ironies of this Ennet/Enfield authority gradient is that no matter where they stand, everyone is a loser, only in inverted ways. You have the AA testimonials, 'lectures' that compel the listeners to Identify with lives that the well-heeled, hyper-educated reader can only pretend to fathom, with stories of almost cartoonish abjection–that revolt as they entertain. Then you have the Enfield lectures, the parsing of tennis into formal abstractions, the clinical explanations of DMZ, annular fusion, and so on–topics and idioms bled white with absence of passion. The reader is successively dragged back and forth, not simply to Ennet House and Enfield Tennis Academy, but through as well, alternately whipped breathless through various pivotal plot points (such as Joelle's suicide attempt, or Don's confrontation with the Canadians), then left to crawl through mountains of trivial information, the dreaded 'info-dump' of science fiction shame. From act to fact, drunkenness to sobriety–just like the Concavity, which cycles between wasteland and jungle. At times Infinite Jest actually seems to be semantic version of the waste that is continually catapulted in the background, at once a herbicide and a fertilizer, making a Concavity of the interior of the reader's skull.

The Gradient, in other words, is everywhere, including the reader. Images can be found within either geographic pole, almost always expressed on the field of language–vocabulary in particular. So in Ennet House you have the culture conflict between the educated and the less educated residents. In Enfield, where almost all the teenagers seem implausibly intellectual (and less interesting and engaging for it), you find it either represented by, or represented in, the films of James O. Incandenza.

In the opening stages of his breakdown (the becoming incompatible of his interior and exterior), Hal finds himself watching, Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency, forwarding to the art instructor protagonist's "climactic lecture" about the desertification resulting from something called the "Flood"–a figure which could mean the explosion of cultural production in the digital age–and the "absence of death as a teleological end":

The art-cartridge critics and scholars who point to the frequent presence of audiences inside Himself's films, and argue that the fact that the audiences are always either dumb or unappreciative or the victims of some grisly entertainment mishap betrays more than a little hostility on the part of an 'auteur' pegged as a technically gifted by narratively dull and plotless and static and not entertaining enough–these academics' arguments seem sound as far as they go, but they do not explain the incredible pathos of Paul Anthony Heaven reading his lecture to a crowd of dead-eye kids picking at themselves and drawing vacant airplane- and genitalia-doodles on their college rule notepads, reading stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit–'For while clinamen and tessera strive to revive or revise the dead ancestor, and while kenosis and daemonization act to repress consciousness and memory of the dead ancestor, it is, finally, artistic askesis which represents the contest proper, the battle-to-the-death with the loved dead–in a monotone as narcotizing as a voice from the grave… (911)

Of all the mise en abymes you will encounter in this book, none are quite so dense as this–narrative frames stacked upon propositional attitudes. The way James O. Incandenza's art internalizes the antagonism between his art and his community. The way the critics, in the course of pointing this out, overlook the pathos of the instructor–the way his passion transcends the ingroup insularity of his lecture. (Wallace, in the same Charlie Rose interview, singles out David Lynch's Blue Velvet as the transformative moment in his writing career, the point where he realized that authors connected by being 'true to themselves'). Here we have the classic image of the Gradient, the classroom, where all the institutional cards are stacked in the specialist's favour, the instructor weeping, speaking with a dead authority about the relationship between the cultural producer and their ancestors to an anaesthetized outgroup (you can almost imagine Schwarzbaum checking her texts). If the reference to Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence wasn't clear enough, Wallace gives us a footnote to tell us as much. The problem, as Wallace seems to frame it, is the disconnect between the poles, the death of artistic authority (a disconnect that could be attributed to Bloom's clinamen, the way literary normative traditions, in a constant state of self-reinvention, migrate further and further from the sensibilities of the masses). The instructor references kenosis, emptying, as occluding the tradition, and Wallace describes the students' doodles as "vacant." Everyone is dead in this image (as perhaps 'social efficiency' demands). Only the weeping is alive.

In a sense, this image unpacks the meaning of the Shakespearean allusion that gives Wallace his title, Hamlet's famous meditation on death and entertainment: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest…" Hamlet recalls the love he bore him, and the joy–the entertainment– but now finds himself nauseated (a symptom Wallace continually attributes to depression). The pendulum has swung to death, the implacable teleology, away from comedy to tragedy, the intellectually privileged mode–the depressive mode.

Infinite Jest may be set in the future, but it is–as Wallace is–a creature of the past, something plucked from the grave and pondered, the skull of something once beloved, once entertaining, but now dead. It is a skull, a memento mori–and I cannot but feel that Wallace wanted us to be nauseated. At times you think it's about redemption in simplicity, the beggar's humble wilfulness to be healed, but not so. Everyone is stranded in this book: the fact of so many hands reaching, for me, simply makes it all the more stark, even perhaps horrifying. Wallace's vision is relentlessly cynical and pessimistic–and read in the historical shadow of his suicide, bent.

The book Infinite Jest (Literature? or ingroup entertainment?) is set up as the antithesis of Infinite Jest the art film (Entertainment? or death?), but in the end they are ultimately the same, just as the 'addicts' at the top of the hill mirror the addicts below. It's like the difference between wet and dry trash. A nimbus of pointlessness shadows everything that transpires–even the apparent redemption people find in AA. James O. Incandenza, we are told, committed suicide because he could not bear sobriety. In his case, drinking literally kept him alive. And the same seems to the case with Hal, who literally splits in two–a flat-affect interior and a hysterically emoting exterior–when he abandons pot. Maybe Gately is our point of egress–or is it regress, once his ersatz gallantry is illuminated by his thoroughly sociopathic past, one where 'kindness' is the accidental byproduct of disinterest. Does merely lacking the will to harm others make him good? The book, remember, ends with a murder.[5]

And this is what makes me think that Schwarzbaum's review in Entertainment Weekly is perhaps the most incisive of all. She alone is clear-eyed enough to see how tribal the book is, how entangled it is with its ingroup community. She alone gets the joke. I had refused to read any supplementary material while reading the book, hoping to follow the footprints it left in fresh snow. I had known about his suicide, of course, and the catastrophic bouts of depression that precipitated it. And at first, I thought the almost palpable sense of self-loathing and class shame I found in the text were simply an expression of this knowledge: suicide is too dramatic not to become an 'alternate ending' unconsciously appended to a dead author's work. But the details kept piling up, so that at times I was convinced that Wallace was actually voicing a version of my own critique of intellectual culture. There was the bankruptcy of Hal and Pemulis (not to mention James O. Incandenza himself), not so much immovable as imperturbable, able to quantify over all possible worlds given their mastery of language and form. Or the AA's demand–worse, healing's demand–for utter intellectual passivity. The vocabulary games, and the way they sorted and alienated. The cliches. And on and on, a perpetual–sometimes even nasty–critique of the very constituency that had made him king.

No, I told myself. It couldn't be. I was a man with a hammer, so of course I was seeing nails everywhere I looked.

When I finally finished, I began with the Charlie Rose interview, and found that I recognized him. You could just smell it: Wallace was one of those inward souls who despised his own pretensions–in interviews you almost see him grimacing beneath the runaway weight of his own vanities. Listening to him, you had this sense that he hated what he had become, hated the artificiality of what his culture was making of him.

I realized that Wallace actually was the kindred spirit my reading wanted to make of him, that he wasn't interrogating, as so many reviewers assumed, the problem of community in the canonical way, which is to say, as something that only 'art' or 'intellect' could save. No. He suffered depression, a malady that some evolutionary psychologists think was selected precisely because it allows us to see past our hard-wired tendency to self-aggrandize. "It seems to me," Wallace says in his Salon interview with Laura Miller, "that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that's gutted our generation." He's arguing something far different, far less flattering to his class: that art and intellect are simply another addiction, another Substance, choosing our incommensurable friends, organizing our incommensurable activities, determining our incommensurable vocabularies. ('Madame Psychosis,' remember, is a performance artist and a narcotic). All the drugs he references, each of them possessing dry consumer product footnotes, are simply part of a continuum, a line running from the Entertainment to DMZ to Joelle's veiled face (the book's primary MacGuffins). Everything has become a drug in his world, something tagged, concentrated, and atomized–unnatural. Especially those things–as Gately's hospitalization reminds us–that purport to cure or to save us.

Nowhere is this more clear than in Wallace's narrative and theoretical meditations on Alcoholics Anonymous. The AA experience, Wallace tells Salon, is "hard for the ones with some education which, to be mercenary, is who this book is targeted at. I mean this is caviar for the general literary fiction reader." He say's 'caviar,' but he could have just as easily said 'crack.' He knows full well who he's representing the AA to (the special forces). "The idea," he says, "that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting … can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo can't, that seems to me to be important."

Simplistic. Cliche. Sentimental. What if these things held the communal key? What are we to make of the chasm between the glowing, effusive testimonials on the book, and the dark and sordid testimonials within? "If an art form is marginalized," Wallace tells Salon, "it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me." The other alternative is that the people speaking have become too self-absorbed to be comprehensible. The AA is a place of retreat in the full sense of the word: a retreat from the world, Out There, certainly, but a retreat from the complications of life as well. A return to the most basic touchstones, those things too worn with use and reliability not to be mocked by those keen to signal their intelligence and entitlement. Make no mistake, the AA is another ingroup, possessing norms and values that Wallace charts with fascinating detail. But unlike intellectual culture, it only sorts people according to need.

"Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis," Sven Birkerts writes in his Atlantic Monthly review, naming the group, anointing Wallace as a celebrated member of his tribe, the Great Ironists. Compare this testimonial to what Gately observes at his AA meetings:

The thing is it has to be the truth to really go over here. It can't be a calculated crowd-pleaser, and it has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic. An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church. (369)

A witch in a church–something antithetical. What does it mean to live in a culture where the art most celebrated has become, not simply irrelevant, but antithetical to those most in need?

Isn't this a tragedy? A glaring symptom of societal breakdown?

It's here that we see the significance of the divided Hal (the one that so horrifies the admissions committee at the beginning of the novel and so puzzles his friends at the end). He becomes the very emblem of the millennial USA: an anhedonic soul and an infantile face. A society jammed by its communicative contradictions, sorting its populations according to intellect and sentiment, and cloistering them in artificial communities (like Enfield, where the sound of weeping is never far), allowing them to congregate, to interact and so counteract each other's excesses, only in the garbage heap (like Ennet House, where humanity reigns at once hobbled and supreme).

But the sad fact is that Wallace, by writing so thoroughly for the literary caviar set (adopting their tricks and tactics and sensibilities), made it impossible for them to see past their gratification.[6] Rather than communicate first-order commonalities, he made them the second-order objects of the very ingroup aesthetic he claimed to critique. If reviews count for anything, he renewed their faith in their moribund, 'gouging' simulacrum of literature. Small wonder he was so dismayed by the reception: He had failed to escape Enfield after all.

In a sense, the real tragedy of this book is this book.[7] It is simply too entertaining–too mercenary–for the specialists. No matter how they trumpet this or that little intellectual buzz, they come away from Infinite Jest both confirmed and affirmed. Even the AA segments of the story (where Wallace often tries to trick the reader into laughing at events that cause the recovering addicts to Identify) generate little more than a gratifying, paternalistic cramps of empathy. The caviar eaters are 'moved,' but only so far–and certainly not so far to ask any of Wallace's fundamental questions. Infinite Jest, they believe, is a pure instance of their 'Substance'–which simply means that Wallace, contrary to his ambition, failed to step on his drugs enough. He thought he was poisoning the pill, when in reality he was simply spiking it–feeding the 'Spider.' And in this sense, Infinite Jest literally enacts the isolating compartmentalization of modern, media-driven culture that it rails against. The empty, formal soul (intellectual culture) detached from the thoughtless, infantile face (popular culture) with only drugs to connect them, if not through the high, then through the levelling misery of recovery.

The idea behind this review was to look at Infinite Jest, not as a computer chip (or a pill), something isolate and discrete, packed with forms, but as something wrenched out of the electronic gut our society, wires hanging, connections sparking. The idea was to review Infinite Jest as an instance of itself. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that I see it as something faulty, broken, dysfunctional.

I first became interested in Infinite Jest after learning that David Foster Wallace was a fallen philosopher like myself: I became curious because I wondered whether I could identify with him. But for all the moments of miniature joy I experienced, it was labourious, sitting like a wart, ugly with meaning, on the arm of my reading chair for week after week. The experience was primarily one of tedium, and a kind autocannibalistic tedium at that, insofar as I realized that Wallace was intentionally playing the tedious and the difficult against the exciting and the facile. As much as its themes resonated, as much as the puzzles intrigued, I found the effort disproportionate to the reward. The fact is, I believe in story. For me, defections from narrative expectations are simply too easy: anyone can break the rules. For me, the truth of fiction lies in the AA meetings, where stories simultaneously connect socially disparate individuals and spark potentially life-changing insights. This is where Literature–understood as a living event, not as something resembling the canonical skeletons displayed in the museum–happens. In this sense Infinite Jest is more an intricate bauble than a work of art, something that identifies and ornaments more than it challenges or transforms, something far too clever to be truly profound.

Always intelligent. Sometimes funny. Rarely touching.

Wallace is the compelling character here, the weeping teacher, reading something that some hear too well to truly listen, and that others hear not at all. The real tragic story. The true literary moment. For me.

The rest is just dirt and bone.

Notes

[1] As readers of Three Pound Brain well know, the interplay between audience alienation and seduction is a primary theme of my cultural criticism. For about a decade now, I've been arguing that any contemporary writer vain enough to harbour literary aspirations (such as myself), needs to become self-conscious of the social and technical conditions of their work, at the risk of merely catering to ingroup expectations–'singing to the choir'–under the guise of challenging received norms and values. I literally think–contrary to, well, pretty much everyone–that the blame for our present cultural straits lies more with the social-psychological dynamics of contemporary arts and academic culture than with (as so many seem to assume) the socio-economic machinery of late capitalism. Not only are humans hardwired to identify themselves, by means fair and foul, over and against other humans, they are also programmed to rationalize those identifications in extravagant fashion. Thus the tribal self-glorification of the Bible, the nightmarish logic of National Socialism, the absurdity of high-school pep-rallies, the popularity of the ad campaign otherwise known as Apple. Thus. Thus. Thus.

[2] All you need do is let the bolus of semantic and normative associations belonging to 'monster truck rallies' linger on your palette, and you should taste the complexity and profundity of the social judgements involved, things typically summarized and dismissed with a snort or a smile–so quickly to be all but unconscious. The human brain is a stereotyping machine, designed by evolution to find and to recognize patterns. Since the finding is far, far more labourious (metabolically speaking), it is far more geared to recognizing things 'already known' than it is in discerning anything new. Human cognition is literally designed to 'judge books by their covers' first, and to only engage in the hard work of actually reading with the utmost reluctance–and it does this regardless of intelligence or education.

 [3] One can adopt a solipsistic, semiotic attitude, treat the novel as 'text,' as something abstract existing in abstraction, and so pretend the novel exists for them alone. One can also do crossword puzzles sitting on the toilet.

[4] This quote reminds me of the old joke about the three snobs, the first claiming he doesn't have a television, the second claiming he doesn't have windows, the third claiming he doesn't have eyes–the joke being, of course, the absurdity of touting a kind of blindness as a mark of social superiority.

[5] Of Gately's criminal cohort, 'Fax,' or truth, who makes a comedy routine of simply repeating "It's a goddamn lie!" in response to everything Gately says.

[6] Because it has to be cognized, the genuinely 'new' is all but impossible to recognize. As a result, institutions rhetorically dedicated to originality find themselves in a peculiar bind. On the one hand, the new has to take the form of the old to be even come to attention: any number of generic concessions must be made. As a result, the 'new' tends to look an awful lot like the old–to appear rather unimpressive when viewed from a distance. On the other hand, when an institution makes this rhetorical commitment–when they fetishize originality and demonize conventionality–they are doomed to drift ever further from the normative sensibilities of the communities that sustain them. The 'newish' might be incremental, but telescoped over time the process gradually rewrites more and more normative expectations, rendering them more and more incomprehensible to mainstream culture. Eventually they find themselves in the peculiar position being neither new nor recognizable–which is to say, artistically interesting in any universal sense or socially relevant anywhere outside of their particular ingroup.

Thus my critical stance toward contemporary literary culture: it seems designed to seize upon and lionize works like Infinite Jest, to universalize what I fear amounts to little more than ingroup self-congratulation.

 [7] As I think Wallace feared.

Aphorism of the Day: The important thing isn't to arrive first, but to arrive big.

Aphorism of the Day II: Imagination becomes a curse precisely when it begins catering to ambition. The world starves what hope enslaves.

One of the things I dislike about blogging is the way it reveals the vagaries of my mood. When it comes to novels, the sheer amount of time you spend with the text assures that you revisit each section with multiple frames of mind—the peaks and valleys are levelled through sheer interference as much as anything else. You can be 'professional' simply because you garble any trace of your emotional presence into a background of white-noise, the nowhere of the disinterested narrator. Not so with blogging. It's all laid out for the careful reader to perceive. So much so that I even have a maxim: 'Do not blog when manic or depressed.'

The rule I'm breaking right now.

I've had a busy weekend. The Nietzsche Workshop seemed like a smashing success. The paper I gave, "Outing the 'It' that Thinks: The Collapse of an Intellectual Ecosystem" seemed to go over far, far better than I had feared. I had worried that Horst Hutter, the one true Nietzsche scholar on our panel, would savage me on my interpretation of the crackpot messiah; he followed me away from the lectern he was so excited with my claims. I had also worried that Arthur Kroker, the one true culture and technology scholar on our panel, would hammer me for claiming that the humanities (as we know them) were about to go extinct in the wake of cognitive science; he had nothing but the highest praise.

So why so down, baby blue?

In the hurley-burley, I had no chance to read the weekend Globe and Mail. So first thing this morning, after getting my tea and Ruby settled with breakfast, I cracked open the Arts section, only to find that John Barber, the Globe's lead arts reporter, had written yet another article on fantasy—this one on the literary re-evaluation of what should have never been a fallen genre. He mentions the success of A Game of Thrones, quotes Erin Morgenstern who's Night Circus has become such a rage, and concludes with Lev Grossman—and in the middle he writes about an upcoming book of essays by the Grande Dame of Canadian Literature, Margaret Atwood, that critiques… you guessed it, the Incredible Shrinking Sublime: "Atwood's essays," he writes "present a multilayered argument in favour of magic in fiction, suggesting that what's really weird (and perhaps passé) are the upstart conventions of social realism."

I don't know Margaret Atwood the person, but Margaret Atwood the public literary figure I well and truly despise, as do many others in the Canadian genre community. Why? Well, check this PBS piece out for one. Every time she comes out with something she fears might be written off as genre, she follows this pattern: Upon release, she says 'This is Literature, not genre,' then proceeds to do what she does in this interview—give the accepted definition of the genre (extrapolation of real technologies), and then claim that the genre (with the all-important proviso, 'means to people') is something obviously silly like 'talking cabbages' and 'lizard men.' If that wasn't bad enough, once the book has been safely accepted as genuine literary fiction, she then turns the strategy upside down, claiming that the book is in fact genre and has been all along, in an effort to increase sales. Rather than fight for genre, she literally—explicitly—steps on it to feather her own nest.

I've exchanged a couple of correspondences on literature and fantasy with John Barber—he's even read the "Dancing Bears and Wild Ones" (which is a cruder, earlier version of "The Future of Literature") in the essay section—but the list of people he references makes clear his interest lies with those already in the cultural spotlight (which is to say, with those people his readers are already interested in). And the fact is, readers will be far more inclined to actually revalue fantasy fiction if they hear the argument from people they already know. In this respect, given all the years I've poured into this particular issue, I should be jumping for joy.

But when it's Margaret Atwood who gets the credit?

Ego, huh? I mean why should this bug me so much? It's not as though I'm in any way original in claiming that genre needs to be taken seriously (though I think my particular argument is original). Ed Kellar's mind-bending presentation at the Workshop, which featured J. G. Ballard, reminded me how old the debate is. Christ, it goes all the way back to James and Wells!

Is it just the idea of outsiders, people who built reputations contra-genre, suddenly spinning with the turn of the tide and getting credit (and spikes in their sales) for their hypocrisy?

No. It's bigger than that. I've felt it for some time, I think. The way I felt it after giving my paper (which I'll be posting shortly) at the Nietzsche Workshop—or even, for that matter, my debate with G. M. Palmer last week. What troubled me so much about the paper was—and this is going to sound strange—that people found it so damn convincing. It's almost like there's an exhaustion in the air, an ambient, communal recognition that the old foundations have rotted beyond repair—that it's time to build a new house. I went in wanting to convince everyone in the audience that this is an age of profound excitement and opportunity. Then I had this premonition, this sudden certainty that arriving first—or at least being ahead of the curve—doesn't really count for anything, that culture will simply brick you over with nary a trace, especially if you fail—as I have failed—to cultivate the proper institutional affiliations. That the opportunity belonged to others, not me.

Being original counts against you, generally speaking. Being right, counts for nothing. Being accredited, successful, or networked, on the other hand…

And it makes me think that this 'fighting for the future' tone I constantly invoke is really just a sham. Have I just been fighting for myself all this time? I worry that my ambitions are every bit as preposterous and absurd as they seem when I glimpse them in the eyes of others.

And at the same time I hate myself for thinking this way: I mean, I've worked, been so poor I had to live off rice for a year, so I know that scraping by on my wits month to month the way I do is nothing short of a miracle–especially in an industry wobbling on the edge of collapse. It almost seems sinful, despairing for my old, youthful dreams of recognition when life is slack enough to afford me time to mope like this.

We should all be so lucky.

And yet, always this fucking hunger for more. Always starved. Always incarcerated.

Watching the likes of Margaret Atwood eat.

Aphorism of the Day: Ask and ye shall be misinterpreted.

[Thanks to Mr. Palmer this has turned into a full blown debate. Rather than endlessly repost, or let the comment section grow as long as a roll of toilet paper I thought I would simply insert the exchange here...]

I noticed a shitload of hits from Reddit, so I clicked and lo, found someone who had actually answered most of the questions! I've posted them below along with my responses.

GMP: AP Lit not Prof but I'll give diffusing these a go:

13) Should we judge Literature by what it resembles or by what it accomplishes?

GMP: We should never judge literature (or anything) by what it resembles. We are not flatterers. If by "what it accomplishes" you mean what level of stimulation we (or society as a whole) get from the literature then yes, that is one criterion by which we should judge literature (i.e. whether or not it is "successful art"–an important question). We also, however, should judge art prima facie as well-done or poorly-done. Therefore you have a Cartesian plane of "artyness" (not to borrow from J. Everett Pritchard's essay in Dead Poet's Society) whereby you plot the influential/stimulative success of a work against its internal "artistic" success. If you want to get all three dimensional you can add "do I like it," though this is so subjective as to be nearly a worthless question in art (and in our case literary) criticism–which is why we are here.

RSB: Largely agree. So the follow up question is then, Why has Literature become a genre, something easily recognized according to what it resembles?

GMP: "Literature" is, at its broadest, textually-based artwork (arguably encompassing visual-dramatic works as well). That's like saying "why has painting become a genre." Now, if you mean "Literary Fiction and Academic Poetry" (as I suppose you do) then the answer to that is that all "art groups" are, more or less, circlejerks. So you have someone like Pound helping to break the grip of the Georgians but instituting an even broader and deeper circlejerk that we have not yet, in some respects, pulled out of.

RSB: Let's call this the Insularity Problem (IP) for ease of reference.

12) If we should judge Literature by what it accomplishes, who should the literary author write for? Audiences who already share their values and attitudes, or audiences who do not?

GMP: This question is a non-sequitur from the previous one. Who should the author write for? That's the author's question, isn't it? Some authors write only for themselves but in doing so create great works. Some authors write only for the money but in doing so create great works. Some authors write for time, dead lovers, dreams, nightmares–an author can write for anything. An author should write for anything. An author should write for what inspires him (or her, of course–we mustn't be un-PC). To address your "values" question it depends upon whether or not the author wishes to engage in demagoguery.

RSB: Quietism is the strongest response to this question I can think of as well. 'Why 'should' the author anything?' The question assumes, however, that challenging values is a signature Literary accomplishment. So insofar as the question, 'What strategies are most likely to challenge values?' has an answer, then so does this question.

GMP: To answer "what strategies are most likely to challenge values" is simple: a slight turning of traditional values. Trap someone in what you are saying and then do the big reveal.

RSB: And generally whose values are being challenged? More specifically, doesn't this implication and reveal strategy turn on differences between the writer and the reader? So much literary fiction that I read seems to require what I call an Ideal Philistine to justify their distinction from good old fashioned apologetic fiction, people who would be troubled, were they to read the book, but never do because of its social identifications.

11) If conventions are nothing more than the expectations of real people, and if people generally prefer to have their expectations confirmed, then doesn't 'violating conventions' amount to turning your back on real people?

GMP: It depends on why you do it (like nearly everything in art). First of all, an artist is under no obligation to give people what they "generally prefer." Secondly, the very notion of "violating conventions" can be done–with skill and care, mind you–to create a sense of distortion (ultimately metaphor) in the reader–which is the only way a reader (or any of us) can absorb an idea. Take "next to of course god america i" by cummings. The theme of the poem is a subversion of patriotism and the form of the poem is a subversion of the Petrarchan sonnet (or at least our expectations of one). Here not only do we have form and theme informing each other but we have the entire thrust of the poem existing from the inversion of our "generally preferred" expectations. Having said that, subverting conventions for the sake of subverting conventions (and not for furthering your art) is puerile.

RSB: To the first, I entirely agree. The writer is under no obligation save, well, consistency with their own rhetoric. All the examples he gives of 'violating conventions' are examples of the problem I pointing out: as soon as 'subversions' actually cater to the expectations of your readers (as is generally the case with in-group artistic exercises) it becomes difficult to see how they count as subversive at all. The point of the question is to underscore just how tricky subversion is generally, and how it becomes impossible once we lose sight of real readers (typically behind so kind of formalism). I'm calling attention to the actual social dimensions of 'rule breaking,' and just how 'pseudo' it has become in literary fiction.

GMP: Well, as I've said, Literary Fiction is a circlejerk. As a genre it has telling features. This is why much of the best writing is done outside of or tangent to the genre (Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Magical Realism, Creative Non-Fiction).

RSB: I identify, brother. I identify!

10) (If fundamentalism is raised as an object of ridicule). Which literary authors write for fundamentalist Christians? (If right-wingers or 'rednecks' are made an object of ridicule). Which literary authors write for rednecks?

GMP: Are we assuming these are supposed to come up in my comments? Or just in class in general? There are a whole class of "cowboy poets" who write "redneck friendly" material. In another vein some of the poems in Broetry are for "rednecks" of a certain set. One could argue many past writers have written for what we consider fundamentalists (certainly there are authors writing for fundamentalists of other religions and belief systems). More importantly is why do you think this question is important?

RSB: The examples given, although interesting, strike me as exceptions that prove the rule. The question is important for many, many reasons, not the least of which, is the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism in popular culture, or worse yet, the staggering fact that a large majority of the population actually believes in the possibility of univocal interpretations of difficult texts (such as the Quran or Bible). To me, this constitutes a staggering educational failure – and a terrifying one – at least as detrimental as the repudiation of evolution. The difference is that the latter has the scientific establishment continually reaching out, whereas the former is grist for self-congratulatory asides at graduate parties.

The question is important because humanity is entering – as a matter of fact (just look at the links Jorge posted!) the shadow of the singularity, and we need to redirect as many critical voices as possible away from each other and toward the community that provides for them.

GMP: Our educational failure has to do with the inability of people to read and count–not the failure of academics and authors to write (unless you argue that academics are teaching teachers–which is a whole other ball of wax). People believe any sort of thing (how many scientists do you know who unequivocally believe in aliens, for instance? I know several–including a teacher who believed we were all "seeded by the Pleiades).

Well, learning to provide for ourselves without dependence upon "big brother" for lack of a better term will serve us better if there ever is a singularity (note: there won't be) because we'll be able to survive outside of a mechanical support structure. But having said that, it's always important to criticize both within and without–to look critically at everything.

RSB: Our educational failure is full spectrum and horrifically complex – which is precisely why it has to be exposed and rectified one fragment at a time. The fact is, literary academics are nowhere near as publicly engaged as they need to be. Everyone I know in the humanities industry thinks the classroom is where they make the difference, illuminating one soul at a time. My argument is simply that this is precisely where they are losing the battle. They're not teaching critical thinking (how can they when they know nothing about it, let alone human cognition?) so much as a new brand of piety, one that has had destructive cultural consequences. They hoover up far too much talent, convince it to go play in the corner with itself

The singularity is defined in many ways. For me it simply denotes the collapse of our 'horizon of expectation,' our ability to reliably predict 'what happens next.' But the accelerating pace of technological innovation is a fact. The way technology transforms social relationships is a fact. And the limited capacity for humans to embrace social transformation is a fact, as is the tendency for humans to embrace irrationalism when they feel threatened. We are the most socially and technically interdependent generation in the history of the human race: I'm not sure I see anywhere to hide.

9) Given that 'groupishness' is a universal human trait, and that groups invariably use their values to assert their social superiority, to police membership, and to secure their institutional privileges, which of your values do you think best serve these various roles?

RSB: None, apparently. I would like to think this is a telling omission [addendum: it was an omission], but who knows?

GMP: Though I find the question odd and vaguely inappropriate, if you mean values as in attributes I would say love and kindness first followed by experience, wisdom, and intelligence. If you mean things I value–probably still the same.

RSB: Curious. Are you saying we don't use our values to socially discriminate? But we do, all the time in fact. You could argue that the institutionalization of practices would be impossible without self-serving valuation. Are you familiar with the psychology of value-attribution? It's all bigotry all the way down.

Since you ARE the yardstick you use, you rarely if ever see yourself measuring, though it often seems painfully obvious in others (such as I likely do to you right now). You judge, you sort and select, dismiss and ignore, all day long, and according to patterns that identify you as belonging to a certain, self-regarding group.

8 ) What's worse: the crap Hollywood produces, or convincing people who might change Hollywood to turn their back on it and only create for people who already share their attitudes and values?

GMP: Neither. What's wrong with entertainment? Do you think Vergil pined his days away because folks when to plays? If you think "the crap Hollywood produces" is so terrible then go be a screenwriter and change that. Shakespeare wrote popular plays, you know.

RSB: As for Shakespeare, my point exactly! As for entertainment, I love it. But I'm also a stickler for consistency, and many, many literary writers like to talk about being more than 'just' an entertainer. My question is simply, How so? I also think that a good number of people live lives completely encapsulated in entertainment, where all the meanings seem stable, and where all their flattering values are endlessly reaffirmed – and here's the thing, on both sides of the literary/non-literary divide. This is a problem isn't it?

Check out this essay if you're interested in the detailed version.

GMP: All artists aspire to be more than "just entertainers." Most litfic types would do well to just make it to the entertainment stage. One wants to educate and to edify as well (some also want to punish and destroy). To the question of people living encapsulated lives: mindlessness is a human condition–it is magical when anyone rises above it.

RSB: Not magical. Just unlikely – for me as much as for you. It's the aspiration you reference that's my target: if this truly is the aspiration of literary educators and producers, then why is so much of their activity aimed at each other?

7) What percentage of scholarly papers would you say are more motivated by the need to secure in–group prestige and/or discharge bureaucratic requirements as opposed to a genuine love of the subject matter?

GMP: 100% of them. Is this surprising? That doesn't mean they aren't also motivated by a love of subject matter but Shakespeare's gotta get paid, son.

RSB: Writing for money, exactly. Shakespeare is actually a bad analogy here, because he had to write for the larger community, rather than other in-group specialists. The follow-up question is whether this state of affairs is problematic in any way.

GMP: It's problematic when you notice how generic most academic papers are. I think the best truly critical work is being done now on blogs and online magazines as it once was done in traditional print magazines.

RSB: Let me ask you: How often have you encountered wholesale institutional critiques such as my own, one's that don't simply express the (flattering) worry that literary culture is becoming a societal wheel that does not turn, but that rather contend it's a wheel turning in the wrong direction altogether? If you have, then please give me references! If you haven't, then what does that say about blindness of your institution?

6) Given that humans are hardwired to appreciate spectacle and convention (one need only look at myth), what are we to make of social groups that explicitly devalue spectacle and convention?

GMP: They're trying to make a kite that won't fly. If you kill kings you just get Cromwells.

RSB: I fully agree. Then why are the quotidian and the experimental prioritized by so many in contemporary literary circles? My suspicion: To keep the unwashed masses out.

GMP: Oh absolutely. Kerouac preached never editing a word but the On the Road MS is fully 1/3 longer than the published version AND he wrote "a million words" before he ever started OTR. Bull like that exists precisely to dupe folks into an inability to challenge the master.

RSB: Values. Power. Self-congratulatory identity claims. Now, I think all this stuff is inevitable. The problem for me lies in the tragic distance between these social facts and the aggrandizing emancipatory rhetoric you find in literary culture. Is anybody really out  to change anything? Not really, it seems to me. If they were, then reaching out would be their mantra, wouldn't it? David Foster Wallace would have written End of Days fiction.

5) To the extent that you teach students what to take seriously, and what you take seriously tends to alienate consumers of popular culture, are you not teaching your students that turning their back on their cultural community is the only way for them to be taken seriously?

GMP: Why does what I take seriously have to tend to alienate consumers of popular culture? Moreover, taking something seriously and being taken seriously yourself are two vastly different things. Why do you feel the need to conflate our opinions of objects with the fact of our self?

RSB: This is simply the way cultural production works. To be taken seriously by a certain community you must produce things that resemble what they take seriously. What many English professors tend to take seriously, 'difficult works,' generally alienate consumers of popular fictions for the very reasons academia takes the seriously in the first place: they cut against those tastes that belong to baseline socialization and appeal to those possessing specialized training. Need I list examples? Given that this is generally the way in-groups self-identify (using patterns of cultural consumption to signal that they are also 'in the know') this starts to seem like it has precious little to do with art, and more to do with carving out a privileged self-identity (something which we cannot help but do). Again, it's the rhetoric you generally encounter that makes this so embarrassing.

GMP: You're certainly correct–but you can't let that rule your reading (or teaching). But it's just as important to understand shibboleths (really what we're looking at here) and to be able to learn and use them to your advantage. Don't bring up Harry Potter in a PhD party unless you're either being derisive or ready to argue for hours. And certainly don't bring up faith in Jesus or conservative politics or anything CRAZY like that. Everyone's a bigot–just about different things (there are some rare exceptions).

RSB: No exceptions. 'Stereotyping' seems to be the very structure of cognition. This is why I go on so much about cartoons. Show me a concept and I'll show you a caricature. It's not that all representation is 'violent,' as the post-structuralist's have it, it's simply that it's low resolution – horribly so.

4) Given (5), would you say you are part of the cultural solution or part of the cultural problem?

GMP: Thinking critically is always part of both. Critical thinkers simultaneously make for a kinder (more open to "the new") and crueler (more critical, duh) society.

RSB: You assume that you're a critical thinker. What if there's no such thing, only moments of critical thought here and there (as mounting evidence seems to suggest)? And what if what you're actually teaching your students is the precise opposite of critical thinking, namely, how to rationalize, or in other words, how to adduce arguments to support a conclusion they have already committed to?

 GMP: But they have to look at (and understand) the text before they can begin to draw conclusions about it. When I tell them a text "means" XYZ, I point out to them all the markers in the text that create that overwhelming meaning. I then teach them how to note those markers themselves and decide upon a meaning. Rationalizing, however, is also an important skill–sometimes you've just got to make up something convincing. True education gives students a chance to know how to use both (and why critical thinking is far more valuable in the long run [or for "important things"] than mere rationalization).

RSB: Rationalization is probably a far more important life-skill, and the ability to game ambiguities is crucial to it. Where does the 'critical thinking' come in? Analytic skills? The ability to empathize? For me critical thinking is a matter of engaging the problem solving circuitry of our brain in a disinterested manner (something which seems to only rarely happen, as you might expect, given the metabolic load it places on the brain). This is one of the reasons traditional humanities educations seems so bloody medieval to me: it poses itself as a solution to a problem that we are only now beginning to define.

3) What's worse: selling out to strangers or writing exclusively to friends?

GMP: Neither–the author writes for what motivates him. Period.

RSB: If other people, or the greater community doesn't motivate them, this means 'friends,' doesn't it? But the question is normative, which makes the descriptive response here seem a bit disingenuous – unless the guy literally has no truck with evaluation at the social and historical level.

GMP: Yeah, I don't give two craps about any notion of "selling out." I take the long view of literature–what influence does it have on society, what influence will it have, and how will it be viewed in 100, 1,000, or 4,000 years? Whether you wrote for a paycheck or to impress a girl or because your friends thought you were funny is immaterial–what you wrote is primary.

RSB: I agree with this entirely.

2) What should society make of authors who continually write about people they are too embarrassed to write for?

GMP: Not sure what you mean–they write about a class of people their works are not addressed to? Don't most folk do this? Think about a show like "Keeping up with the Kardashians." These are rich people, yes? But is the show written for rich people? Hardly.

RSB: Actually, no. But even if this was the case, I'm not sure what the relevance would be, simply because it's the status quo which is being critiqued here! The point of the question, again, is to get people thinking about audiences and the kinds of social dynamics that frame literary culture and production. So, the follow-up question would be, Why don't literary authors write for the people they write generally about?

GMP: I think they do. Most current literary fiction I know of is about the Apple-Owning, sarcastic hipster set. Think about The Kite Runner. It's not about people in Afghanistan. It's about an Afghan immigrant with an English degree and his teacher wife almost trapped in an almost loveless and certainly childless marriage in trendy San Francisco–you can just imagine the narrator being the "hip-not-white" friend of every literary loser in town.

RSB: LOL! I liked that book (for the reasons you enumerate above: it prevented untold millions from committing what psychologists call outgroup homogeneity bias at a politically decisive time). I'm not sure I agree with your 'most current literary fiction' claim, but that could be a function of what I happen to be reading.

But in a sense, your (contrary) observation serves my underlying argument, the Insularity Problem. It could be regimented this way:

1)     Literary specialists regularly declare the need to change the greater culture.

2)     Literary specialists regularly direct their efforts away from the greater culture.

Meanwhile, the irony still stands. The Rabbit Tetrology is the most classic example I can think of. When my wife worked for Oxford University Press she brought home this anthology called Literature of the Working Class, filled with fiction about the working class and by authors who had bootstrapped themselves out of the working class, and not a single thing that anyone from the working class would be the least bit interested in – and much they would be alienated and insulted by.

There's something troubling about this, and something that illustrates – if not explains – the violent anti-intellectualism you find, not in the corners (that's where the literati live), but in the centre of the world.

1) Have you ever admired yourself wearing a scarf in a mirror?

GMP: Every winter's day.

RSB: Brrr! He just had to bring up winter! For the months of September and October, it's actually a non-felony criminal offense here in Canada…

GMP: Ha! Florida here. We spend nine months of the year pining for our precious taste of cold.

RSB: Then, gotcha! There is no winter in Florida!

Aphorism of the Day: Ask and ye shall be misinterpreted.

I noticed a shitload of hits from Reddit, so I clicked and lo, found someone who had actually answered most of the questions! I've posted them below along with my responses.

AP Lit not Prof but I'll give diffusing these a go:

13) Should we judge Literature by what it resembles or by what it accomplishes?

We should never judge literature (or anything) by what it resembles. We are not flatterers. If by "what it accomplishes" you mean what level of stimulation we (or society as a whole) get from the literature then yes, that is one criterion by which we should judge literature (i.e. whether or not it is "successful art"–an important question). We also, however, should judge art prima facie as well-done or poorly-done. Therefore you have a Cartesian plane of "artyness" (not to borrow from J. Everett Pritchard's essay in Dead Poet's Society) whereby you plot the influential/stimulative success of a work against its internal "artistic" success. If you want to get all three dimensional you can add "do I like it," though this is so subjective as to be nearly a worthless question in art (and in our case literary) criticism–which is why we are here.

Largely agree. So the follow up question is then, Why has Literature become a genre, something easily recognized according to what it resembles?

12) If we should judge Literature by what it accomplishes, who should the literary author write for? Audiences who already share their values and attitudes, or audiences who do not?

This question is a non-sequitur from the previous one. Who should the author write for? That's the author's question, isn't it? Some authors write only for themselves but in doing so create great works. Some authors write only for the money but in doing so create great works. Some authors write for time, dead lovers, dreams, nightmares–an author can write for anything. An author should write for anything. An author should write for what inspires him (or her, of course–we mustn't be un-PC). To address your "values" question it depends upon whether or not the author wishes to engage in demagoguery.

Quietism is the strongest response to this question I can think of as well. 'Why 'should' the author anything?' The question assumes, however, that challenging values is a signature Literary accomplishment. So insofar as the question, 'What strategies are most likely to challenge values?' has an answer, then so does this question.

11) If conventions are nothing more than the expectations of real people, and if people generally prefer to have their expectations confirmed, then doesn't 'violating conventions' amount to turning your back on real people?

It depends on why you do it (like nearly everything in art). First of all, an artist is under no obligation to give people what they "generally prefer." Secondly, the very notion of "violating conventions" can be done–with skill and care, mind you–to create a sense of distortion (ultimately metaphor) in the reader–which is the only way a reader (or any of us) can absorb an idea. Take "next to of course god america i" by cummings. The theme of the poem is a subversion of patriotism and the form of the poem is a subversion of the Petrarchan sonnet (or at least our expectations of one). Here not only do we have form and theme informing each other but we have the entire thrust of the poem existing from the inversion of our "generally preferred" expectations. Having said that, subverting conventions for the sake of subverting conventions (and not for furthering your art) is puerile.

To the first, I entirely agree. The writer is under no obligation save, well, consistency with their own rhetoric. All the examples he gives of 'violating conventions' are examples of the problem I pointing out: as soon as 'subversions' actually cater to the expectations of your readers (as is generally the case with in-group artistic exercises) it becomes difficult to see how they count as subversive at all. The point of the question is to underscore just how tricky subversion is generally, and how it becomes impossible once we lose sight of real readers (typically behind so kind of formalism). I'm calling attention to the actual social dimensions of 'rule breaking,' and just how 'pseudo' it has become in literary fiction.

10) (If fundamentalism is raised as an object of ridicule). Which literary authors write for fundamentalist Christians? (If right-wingers or 'rednecks' are made an object of ridicule). Which literary authors write for rednecks?

Are we assuming these are supposed to come up in my comments? Or just in class in general? There are a whole class of "cowboy poets" who write "redneck friendly" material. In another vein some of the poems in Broetry are for "rednecks" of a certain set. One could argue many past writers have written for what we consider fundamentalists (certainly there are authors writing for fundamentalists of other religions and belief systems). More importantly is why do you think this question is important?

The examples given, although interesting, strike me as exceptions that prove the rule. The question is important for many, many reasons, not the least of which, is the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism in popular culture, or worse yet, the staggering fact that a large majority of the population actually believes in the possibility of univocal interpretations of difficult texts (such as the Quran or Bible). To me, this constitutes a staggering educational failure – and a terrifying one – at least as detrimental as the repudiation of evolution. The difference is that the latter has the scientific establishment continually reaching out, whereas the former is grist for self-congratulatory asides at graduate parties.

The question is important because humanity is entering – as a matter of fact (just look at the links Jorge posted!) the shadow of the singularity, and we need to redirect as many critical voices as possible away from each other and toward the community that provides for them.

9) Given that 'groupishness' is a universal human trait, and that groups invariably use their values to assert their social superiority, to police membership, and to secure their institutional privileges, which of your values do you think best serve these various roles?

None, apparently. I would like to think this is a telling omission, but who knows?

8 ) What's worse: the crap Hollywood produces, or convincing people who might change Hollywood to turn their back on it and only create for people who already share their attitudes and values?

Neither. What's wrong with entertainment? Do you think Vergil pined his days away because folks when to plays? If you think "the crap Hollywood produces" is so terrible then go be a screenwriter and change that. Shakespeare wrote popular plays, you know.

As for Shakespeare, my point exactly! As for entertainment, I love it. But I'm also a stickler for consistency, and many, many literary writers like to talk about being more than 'just' an entertainer. My question is simply, How so? I also think that a good number of people live lives completely encapsulated in entertainment, where all the meanings seem stable, and where all their flattering values are endlessly reaffirmed – and here's the thing, on both sides of the literary/non-literary divide. This is a problem isn't it?

Check out this essay if you're interested in the detailed version.

7) What percentage of scholarly papers would you say are more motivated by the need to secure in–group prestige and/or discharge bureaucratic requirements as opposed to a genuine love of the subject matter?

100% of them. Is this surprising? That doesn't mean they aren't also motivated by a love of subject matter but Shakespeare's gotta get paid, son.

Writing for money, exactly. Shakespeare is actually a bad analogy here, because he had to write for the larger community, rather than other in-group specialists. The follow-up question is whether this state of affairs is problematic in any way.

6) Given that humans are hardwired to appreciate spectacle and convention (one need only look at myth), what are we to make of social groups that explicitly devalue spectacle and convention?

They're trying to make a kite that won't fly. If you kill kings you just get Cromwells.

I fully agree. Then why are the quotidian and the experimental prioritized by so many in contemporary literary circles? My suspicion: To keep the unwashed masses out.

5) To the extent that you teach students what to take seriously, and what you take seriously tends to alienate consumers of popular culture, are you not teaching your students that turning their back on their cultural community is the only way for them to be taken seriously?

Why does what I take seriously have to tend to alienate consumers of popular culture? Moreover, taking something seriously and being taken seriously yourself are two vastly different things. Why do you feel the need to conflate our opinions of objects with the fact of our self?

This is simply the way cultural production works. To be taken seriously by a certain community you must produce things that resemble what they take seriously. What many English professors tend to take seriously, 'difficult works,' generally alienate consumers of popular fictions for the very reasons academia takes the seriously in the first place: they cut against those tastes that belong to baseline socialization and appeal to those possessing specialized training. Need I list examples? Given that this is generally the way in-groups self-identify (using patterns of cultural consumption to signal that they are also 'in the know') this starts to seem like it has precious little to do with art, and more to do with carving out a privileged self-identity (something which we cannot help but do). Again, it's the rhetoric you generally encounter that makes this so embarrassing.

4) Given (5), would you say you are part of the cultural solution or part of the cultural problem?

Thinking critically is always part of both. Critical thinkers simultaneously make for a kinder (more open to "the new") and crueler (more critical, duh) society.

You assume that you're a critical thinker. What if there's no such thing, only moments of critical thought here and there (as mounting evidence seems to suggest)? And what if what you're actually teaching your students is the precise opposite of critical thinking, namely, how to rationalize, or in other words, how to adduce arguments to support a conclusion they have already committed to?

3) What's worse: selling out to strangers or writing exclusively to friends?

Neither–the author writes for what motivates him. Period.

If other people, or the greater community doesn't motivate them, this means 'friends,' doesn't it? But the question is normative, which makes the descriptive response here seem a bit disingenuous – unless the guy literally has no truck with evaluation at the social and historical level.

2) What should society make of authors who continually write about people they are too embarrassed to write for?

Not sure what you mean–they write about a class of people their works are not addressed to? Don't most folk do this? Think about a show like "Keeping up with the Kardashians." These are rich people, yes? But is the show written for rich people? Hardly.

Actually, no. But even if this was the case, I'm not sure what the relevance would be, simply because it's the status quo which is being critiqued here! The point of the question, again, is to get people thinking about audiences and the kinds of social dynamics that frame literary culture and production. So, the follow-up question would be, Why don't literary authors write for the people they write generally about?

1) Have you ever admired yourself wearing a scarf in a mirror?

Every winter's day.

Brrr! He just had to bring up winter! For the months of September and October, it's actually a non-felony criminal offense here in Canada…

Aphorism of the Day:  Questions make ignorance visible, ignorance makes hypocrisy viable, and hypocrisy makes self-interest divine. All authority requires the conservation of ignorance, especially when it pretends to educate.

As promised. Feel free to ammend or to add questions of your own. For those of you who are both wired and virally minded, pass this on, and do post the responses you encounter (in your conscience if nowhere else)!  I would love to see this plague literary academics everywhere, and perhaps induce some to defend their values here. 

13) Should we judge Literature by what it resembles or by what it accomplishes?

12) If we should judge Literature by what it accomplishes, who should the literary author write for? Audiences who already share their values and attitudes, or audiences who do not?

11) If conventions are nothing more than the expectations of real people, and if people generally prefer to have their expectations confirmed, then doesn't 'violating conventions' amount to turning your back on real people?

10) (If fundamentalism is raised as an object of ridicule). Which literary authors write for fundamentalist Christians? (If right-wingers or 'rednecks' are made an object of ridicule). Which literary authors write for rednecks?

9) Given that 'groupishness' is a universal human trait, and that groups invariably use their values to assert their social superiority, to police membership, and to secure their institutional privileges, which of your values do you think best serve these various roles?

8 ) What's worse: the crap Hollywood produces, or convincing people who might change Hollywood to turn their back on it and only create for people who already share their attitudes and values?

7) What percentage of scholarly papers would you say are more motivated by the need to secure in–group prestige and/or discharge bureaucratic requirements as opposed to a genuine love of the subject matter?

6) Given that humans are hardwired to appreciate spectacle and convention (one need only look at myth), what are we to make of social groups that explicitly devalue spectacle and convention?

5) To the extent that you teach students what to take seriously, and what you take seriously tends to alienate consumers of popular culture, are you not teaching your students that turning their back on their cultural community is the only way for them to be taken seriously?

4) Given (5), would you say you are part of the cultural solution or part of the cultural problem?

3) What's worse: selling out to strangers or writing exclusively to friends?

2) What should society make of authors who continually write about people they are too embarrassed to write for?

1) Have you ever admired yourself wearing a scarf in a mirror?

Aphorism of the Day: Stupid is as stupid buzz.

I've been up to my eyeballs with work these past couple weeks, which is why I haven't been able  to weigh in on any of our most recent debates. If I stick to form, I'll probably come up with something interesting to say long after everyone has forgotten what the issue is. For those of you interested, I have a couple of local appearances coming up: I'm doing a reading at Fanshawe College this Thursday, September 22nd at 2PM in room D1060. And I'm a keynote at this year's Nietzsche Workshop, on October 1st, at the University of Western Ontario. I'm pretty sure that people need to register to attend the latter, but the reading is open to all.

Anyway, in the near future I'm hoping to post the Three Pound Brain's first book review on David Foster Wallace's The Infinite Jest, and also to finally get around to posting "Questions to Fuck Up your English Professor," something which I promised long ago, but predictably lost in the shuffle. Writing it here counts as what psychologists call an "implementation intention," which is supposed to help knobs like me actually accomplish what they want to accomplish.

We shall see.

Definition of the Day – Literary criticism: 1) A kind of thong worn by the intellectually obese; 2) The morbid compulsion to floss dentures. See, Exhibitionism, Sublimated Versions of.

So we have these three pound brains capable (according to some estimates) of performing some 38,000 trillion operations per second and possessing around 3,600 terabytes of memory. At this very moment, the most complicated system known to humanity is humming behind your eyes, and the eyes of billions of others—billions—each of them 'programmed' by a unique set of circumstances.

Which brings me to the puny string of code we like to call 'language.'

Somehow, using only the reed-thin bandwidths of oral and visual signalling, these supercomplicated systems are able to coordinate, assimilate, and compete. Posed in these terms, it almost seems a miracle that language works at all. In a sense, it's like stirring the ocean with a swizel-stick, except that this particular ocean consists of information: everything the system takes up will have systematic consequences—potentially drastic ones. Love. Murder. This ocean has evolved to be stirred by next to nothing at all. So the question is, what will any given brain make of any given string of linguistic code.

The question is interpretation.

The urge here is to go formal. The complexities are such that it seems necessary to push abstraction to the limit to say much of anything at all. Each brain will make what it will of any given linguistic instance—each reading will be unique. But what we want is to generalize over a plurality of readings, and to arbitrate between them. So let's say the 'meaning' of any linguistic communication is simply the overall state of the interpreting system. Since every system is unique (and since the complexity of the system dwarfs that of the communication), you can say that for any piece of code, there will be as many meanings as there are readers. To the degree that every system resembles every other system, you can predict that these meanings will converge, cluster about points of interpretative agreement.

At least two interpretative axes can be distinguished:

1)     Communicative: where a given response generally accords with the sender's 'intention.'

 2)     Generative: where a given response generally diverges with the sender's 'intention.' In this case, the receiving system generates a reading more or less incompatible with what the sender was 'hoping to convey.' Generative readings can be either be normative or idiosyncratic. Normative generative readings are those interpretations that are common, even though the sender never 'intended' them. Idiosyncratic generative readings are those interpretations that are rare. They in turn can be either infective, which is to say, convincing to others, or morbid.

Straightforward enough, so far. The lurking problem here is hinted at in the scare-quotes around 'intention.' You see, the difficulty isn't simply the relative information density of the brain versus the paucity of language, it's also the question of where we—that is, the conscious portions of our brain—fit into all of this. Language amounts to throwing pennies at the GDP of nations as it is, and yet only a fraction of its effects are accessible to consciousness. Words just comes to us. Poof! there they are, attributions of value and all.

We, the conscious writer and the conscious reader, are literally a bottleneck in a bottleneck. Language comes to us, and we formulate our comprehension of it in—guess what?—more language. Only encapsulation gives us the illusion that we control, let alone fathom, what our brains are doing. You could say our readings own us far more than otherwise.

Who can say what they 'really intended' while writing? Who can say that they 'truly gave the benefit of the doubt' to what they were reading? Not only does our ill-will have a habit of slipping between the cracks of our attention, it tends to be excised from the 'official record' as well. And the list of possible 'skews' goes on. We're just a whitehead on a pimple on the big fat ass of our brain.

So, the question: Are we really just stranded with rank guesswork when it comes to issues of meaning? Does anyone know what the fuck they're talking about? Are there any criteria that can rescue interpretation?

Aphorism of the Day: What begins with information always ends with matter. Who would have thought that stealing ghosts could ruin lives? 

Years ago, I remember hearing a technology specialist talk about how every business model that turns on the propriety control of information was doomed. This seemed about right, since I had just published The Darkness That Comes Before at the time. Of course it was the end! 

Here's a sobering presentation of how publishing business is faring, and what it can expect…

All the ebook pirates out there need to go online and illegally download Rapa Nui.

Aphorism of the Day: As soon as etiquette, any etiquette, is professionalized, then the quirks that illuminate and individuate are all but doomed. No yardstick is more unforgiving than a well-meaning one. No condescension is more unyielding than kindness.

First, some cherry-picking: Luke Barrage has posted a podcast review of The White-Luck Warrior where he spends the better part of an hour discussing the issue of misogyny in the series. E.D Kain also weighs in on the issue more generally on his blog.

Also, I'm on holidays, and will be for the next several days, so apologies to all those who've posted comments. Hopefully I won't be too buried to reply to them by time I'm back online regularly.

What I really want to discuss was The Atlantic's recent Fiction 2011 issue. I'm not sure what to say about the short stories selected, except that I prefer writers whose personality leaps from their prose–the very thing the creative writing industry seems bent on murdering.

What I want to raise as a topic for debate is Bret Anthony Johnston's pretend article against the literary slogan, "Write what you know." I say 'pretend' simply because I can't see how anyone committed to the maxim would disagree with anything he says. Since the slogan is aimed at fiction writers, it seems painfully obvious (to me, anyway) that most everyone would paraphase the maxim to mean, "Use what you know to breath life into what you invent."

In this sense, Johnston's article isn't so much critical of the slogan as it's critical of a certain facile, and my guess is, relatively rare misinterpretation of it. Apparently some of his creative writing students seem reluctant to diverge from 'what they know' in any way.

From beginning to the end, Johnston assumes the Priority of the Mundane over the Spectacular. You can bet no one is writing epic fantasy in his class. Personally, this is how I've always understood, "write what you know": as a way to demarcate what is cool – or 'serious' – from what is uncool – or 'silly' – from the standpoint of a particular, identity-obsessed, in-group – 'the literary.' Since the masses have a baseline appreciation, even hunger for, spectacle, one handy way to define yourself over and against the masses is to condemn it, turn it into a marker of what advertisers call, 'negative reference groups.' Want to become one of the 'cultured'? Make a fetish of the mundane, something which this slogan does quite effectively by turning the question of proper content into a question of honesty.

But, like so many self-serving rhetorical ploys, only a question or two is required to pull the whole house of winning-hands down. The resulting implicatures tend to be weak, which is why things get so thorny so quickly if you take such ploys as a basis for further reasoning – which is precisely what Johnston does here.

Consider his final diagnosis of what might be going on:

"What if the reason we find it so difficult to cleave our fiction from experience, the reason we're so loath to engage our imaginations and let the story rise above the ground floor of truth, isn't that we're afraid we'll do the job poorly, but that we're afraid we'll do it too well?"

I still find myself marvelling over this, so much so that I urge you to read the article for yourself. Is he really suggesting that the culprit is the possibility that we writers will be dwarfed by what we write, that our work will blot our role from the reader's mind, and develop a life of its own?

Is he really saying that what holds these young writers back is the fear that they will actually write the book they dream of writing? Don't we all write to be blotted out by our creations? Isn't that the whole point? To say something bigger (with things small – in the case of literary fiction).

Either way, I have a far more likely culprit for his student's reluctance: status anxiety. His creative wards are desperately trying to join a community obsessed with content and authenticity. What? Me, write from the perspective of a handicapped, black, jewish grandmother?

Like anyone trying to 'learn the ropes' of any unforgiving social game, the literary wannabes in Johnston's class are simply 'playing it safe.'  They see a genre that defines itself against imaginative 'excess' – commercial genre – so they find themselves afraid to use their imagination at all.

And this suggests that Johnston's essay is actually about something far different than what it purports to be: a crisis of imagination in a moribund institution, desperately rooting about for ways to affirm its relevance and vitality.

I'll let Johnston have the final words… (well, almost):

"Writers may enter their stories through literal experience , through the ground floor, but fiction brings with it an obligation to rise past the base level, to transcend the limitations of fact and history, and proceed skyward…"

 But only a few inches, no more.

Aphorism of the Day: Ask the right question and a fool will build his own gallows. Answers for wood. Presumption for rope.

So I finished teaching that creative writing class at Fanshawe – my first straight gig in, like, a decade or so. I had a blast, and from what I could tell, the rest of my class did as well. I was going to write that I wasn't sure why I love teaching as much as I do, then it occurred to me that this wasn't true. There's something about throwing the light switch on for a bunch of 'young people.'  There's something about making a room full of people laugh.

It makes me think of the old Burt Lancaster film, Elmer Gantry, the story of a shill who falls in love with a Christian Revivalist, and through sheer sociopathic charm beds her and takes over her mission. Lancaster does a brilliant job broadcasting the animality that underwrites so much spirituality, and the film does a brilliant job depicting the mobbish ecstasy of submission en masse.

Not to say my course was anything remotely approaching this ("Raise your hands and sing out the Glory of the Revised Manuscript and the Well-Written Query!"), but something happens sometimes, I think, in certain classes, something they call learning but feels more like trust. Whatever it is, we had it.

I was worried going in, simply because the course was too big to effectively workshop: How do you teach creative writing without workshopping? In a sense, you don't. So I began with the sociology and psychology of creative writing, discussing audiences and authority gradients, the structure of 'stable communication' and the way literature tries to both milk and undermine it. Blah-blah-blah.

All the while I assigned paragraphs, which was always the core of my teaching strategy back when I taught basic college writing courses. Paragraphs, paragraphs, paragraphs. Two for every three classes, assigned in class to be turned in personally the following day. This encourages attendance, and most importantly, it keeps your students constantly writing, constantly engaged, through the week.

And I'll be damned if it doesn't seem to work. 

The idea behind each assignment was to tackle one of a number of things that tend to distinguish amateurish writing from professional work. It's amazing how important the paragraph is, structurally speaking, and how much it can transform your writing once you master them. They are the cogs… or even better, the sprockets, of well written fiction.

So… like, yah… It was pretty cool.

But nowhere near so cool as sitting on your ass pondering apocalyptic madness on your screen…

The big reason I've been posting here as often as I have was simply that the class stranded me with small chunks of my day, and my brain is a diesel: it takes sometime to warm up. In a sense, this was where I was the student: I feel as though I've learned so much about the more ephemeral aspects of the biz.

For the first time in my career I actually started paying close attention to my sales. Amazon has a feature that allows authors to manage their own books and provides Bookscan data broken down by region in the US. I now know, for instance, that I am far bigger in traditional blue states than I am in red (no surprise there, I suppose, but I was hoping). I've also come to realize that my US sales are far below what they could be, compared to the UK and Canadian markets. And unfortunately, I now know just how dismally my two side-projects, Neuropath and Disciple of the Dog, have fared. (You're a bunch of genre purists out there, you know that?)

But I also learned that The Second Apocalypse is alive and well, as tenacious as C. difficile in the cultural gut, and most importantly, growing, not quickly, mind you, but steadily – enough for me to turn down a full-time teaching job… Something which is gold these here parts.

Now I gotta make like Elmer Gantry, only without the womanizing, the speaking-in-tongues, the ranting and raving about What God Wants according to this ancient prose-poem. (The hellfire and damnation stuff I'm okay with).

I need to save some souls from the iniquity of certain certainties.

Sell a fucking book or two.

And write.

The new side project, what I turn to when I burn out on The Unholy Consult, will be a selection of stories and vignettes call Atrocity Tales, concentrating on events from the founding of the Consult to the rise of the Scarlet Spires during the Scholastic Wars. I'll be posting them online as I go, soliciting feedback, and hopefully providing newcomers a less daunting way to climb into the series. Something to take the density out of The Darkness That Comes Before. Something easier to recommend.