Bookcase.

Oddly - or perhaps not - my ideal bookcase is not significantly different from my actual bookcase. For several years now I have been engaged in a life project of minimizing what I own and this has led me to a place where I’ve downsized my library by more than half. So when I sit at my table writing, I can glance up and see them peering back at me, the books. My living room is dominated by several of those cheap black Ikea honeycomb shelf cubes. They’re low and flat and I don’t put anything on top of them. The long bare line of the top of the bookcases helps make the room seem tidy, it makes the ceiling seem high, and it helps to create a sense of calm which brings me a lot of joy. Depending on what I’m writing, I will rearrange the books on the shelves nearest to me. Much like the lighting design of a theater, I like to design the creative radiation coming at me from the nearest books. This would be my ideal design:


Amnesiascope, Steve Erickson. For the longest time this was my favorite book. It is strange and sexy and meandering and not really about anything, but also kind of about everything.


Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins. For my money this is just about the most perfect and beautiful small novel.


Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Aimee Bender. Basically just the best collection of stories ever.


The Godfather, Mario Puzo. Despite the book’s pulpy reputation and the movie(s) overshadowing it, this is a huge and epic novel that deals with everything from Medieval history to Vegas showbiz politics in the 1950s. I’m shocked that it isn’t read more.


House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski. There is something darkly magical about this book. When you read it, it invades your life and hides in all the dark places. I have never read anything else that is as much of an experience as this weird, weird, weird book.


One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. So cliche, I know! But it is only about 400 pages long and yet seems to contain within it everything.


Collected Stories, Carol Shields. Shields is a talented writer, but I own this collection because it contains her story “Various Miracles” which is one of the best things I have ever read.


Said the Shotgun to the Head, Saul Williams. This is the “book” that first made me question the differences between poetry and narrative, fiction and nonfiction, text and graphic design. This book is still a big deal to me and I think about it WAY more than is reasonable.


The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Lydia Davis. Does it get better than Lydia Davis? I love not just her writing but also the way that she will write something and say, “Here world, I wrote this. You figure it out, I’m busy writing the next thing.”


The World Without Us, Alan Weisman. This is the nonfiction book that everybody was reading on airplanes several years ago. It simply imagines what would happen on Earth if all humans suddenly disappeared. Such a simple idea, but it is fascinating.


All in the Timing, David Ives. This collection of one-act plays contains the seminal work “Variations on the Death of Trotsky” which is not just absurd, but brillant.


Sixty Stories, Donald Barthelme. For the better part of a decade I have been haunted by the story in this collection “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning”. I cannot figure out what makes this story work. When I don’t know what to write, I take this book to a bar and try to crack that story.


Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands, Judith Schalansky. This is literally a tiny book of maps of remote islands. Accompanying each map, there are two pages describing something about the island. It is oddly heart-breaking in a way that I have never been able to properly describe.

Killing My Idols: A Rant.

As someone who is currently being forced to read some exceedingly boring, self-involved literary criticism, I thought: why the hell not write some!

This is not so much criticism of the academic sort, but rather the sort of criticism that one receives from one’s mother.

I don’t mean to bemoan the state of modern American fiction so much as I would like to openly and actively bitch about it.

If we met at a very fancy party and you asked me who I read or who my influences are (this does actually happen BTW, and not just at parties in my own head) then I would say what I have been saying my entire life: I read Steve Erickson, I read Jonathan Lethem, I read Aimee Bender, I read Mark Danielewski, Don DeLillo, Junot Diaz, and on and on and on and I would hit all of the proper g-spots.

For those of you who do not go to these sorts of parties; imagine showing up to a new job where everyone watches Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Mad Men. And you say, “I watch all of those too!” but for effect you throw in Downton Abbey or Dexter or House of Cards, because you want to broaden the field. Or - if you really want to open it up - “I have been watching The State Within” or “I just started Skins on Netflix.”

Anyway. Point being, yes these are all good shows. Even if you don’t watch them, you probably have - at some point - seen them. And they are usually undeniably good. But are they satisfying you in a deeper way? Maybe they are. I don’t know that much about what satisfies you in a deeper way because you never comment on this blog and tell me!

Well imagine that you felt a personal investment in whether or not these shows are both good and deeply satisfying. Imagine that, while these shows are good and beyond reproach, you feel that they are missing something that there is an essential vitality and soul that just isn’t present in them anymore. That is how I have been feeling lately about the state of modern American literary fiction (what the rest of the world just calls: novels.)

I feel that there is a vitality missing, that some essential element of fear and of anger and of joy has gone out of that world.

Since we aren’t at a fancy party I feel okay admitting to you that while Steve Erickson has probably been for me the most formative novelist I have ever encountered in my life, his last two novels were almost impossible for me to get through. And Jonathan Lethem - though I love him so - seems to have been writing exclusively for the Pulitzer committee with everything he’s done since Motherless Brooklyn. Danielewski owes all of his counter-culture-hero status to House of Leaves and his work since then - I say this with all dues respect - would not have elevated him to literary luminary status. I’m fairly certain that Only Revolutions was written with the expressed (kinda D-bag-y) intent of creating an impenetrable masterwork on the assumed level of Ulysses or The Waste Land or Gravity’s Rainbow. So YAY for pedantic obfuscation! I guess.

I guess I’m in the mood to kill my idols tonight.

This is why I am terrible at academic literary criticism BTW, I have difficulty concealing my displeasure. Also, I don’t actually try to be a backbiter - I like to think that I have angels on my shoulder when I write this stuff -  and lets face it, backbiting is really all that academic literary criticism is …

Well, that may not be fair. To be fair, most academic literary criticism is about coming up with a largely backbiting idea and then turning it into an abstract to submit to a conference and then if you get accept to the conference you write the paper and then present it at the conference and that goes on your CV and one day that CV will help you get a professorship somewhere and once you have a professorship you can get tenor and then that is basically WINNING! (Somebody tell the balloon-drop guys!)

But that is not my complaint here today. Every industry and profession has its own self-serving, self-justifying feedback loops.

My complaint today is the lack of verve, of energy, of zest in modern American literary fiction. I don’t specifically blame this on Junot Diaz or any of the others I’ve specifically mentioned (Although that dude got himself a MacArthur genius grant which pissed me off because he was already in the position to do nothing but write his name on cocktail napkins and he’d have been a bestseller for the rest of his life.) I blame it on all of us. I blame it on our entire culture. I blame this on a society that tells Joss Whedon that Avengers was a good movie. It was not. The first half was pretty good, the second half was for fifteen-year-old boys, which is what most of us are now. I blame it on a culture that melts the internet when Miley Cyrus goes on television and does exactly what our culture tells her to do. I blame it on adults making cultural phenomenons out of books that are written specifically for teenages.

I have no problem with escapism. I have a problem with the fact that I have nothing to choose between except escapism and the myth of meritocracy. I have a problem with the fact that oh so many years ago Jonathan Franzen had to give a fuck what Oprah thought, but I also have a problem with the fact that Jonathan Frazen’s book was stultifyingly boring, and I also have a problem with the fact that Jonathan Frazen was a dick to Oprah. How the fuck hard is it to be nice to Oprah?

By this point I have written a blog post that seems (to you) a little rant-y but to me could actually be a little career-kill-y should I ever end up in a room with the people who control America’s literary fiction world. But let’s face it, with every day that passses there is less and less chance that I am ever going to end up in that room. But, of course, there is always a chance. But I’m risking it anyway. Because that is the kind of risk - the kind of zest and verve and vitality - that I think there is too little of lately.


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