george saunders

http://maudnewton.com/blog/?p=5610

Being about systems and ideas is one field where books have the advantage over film. But when it comes to whimsy, the book/film connection seems to be something else: the literary novel is officially Not Important Anymore. There's something so half-ridiculous about the fact of even writing one that it's easy to see where the whimsy comes in: what the hell, it's your novel, people hardly even read books anymore, might as well have fun with it. The problem here isn't whimsy, or "books about ideas" versus "books about people," but the fact that neither of those categories usually packs the ambition to say something grand and far-reaching and real.

Still, though, I'm sensitive to seeing someone congratulate a writer for being "less 'inventive'," despite the scare quotes. Why? Because I don't trust the way things are written off as whimsy or wacky when they very often mean something completely unwhimsical, both to writer and reader. Since this is a Saunders thread, "Sea Oak" again -- it has the tone that many would call whimsical, but I can't sort out a single element in it that doesn't seem focused and meaningful and directly relevant to something serious (and serious-minded) to say about people. So I sometimes read charges about "hysterical-realist" books as being like charges about "pretentious" bands -- sometimes they're spot-on, but all too often they're a way of dismissing some perception of "style" without even bothering to notice that it's actually genuine substance.

Naturally, I'm in favour of inventiveness that's natural and creative; but zaniness for the sake of it - like the talking turd in Frantzen, or the talking lawnmower in a story by Frances gapper that I read recently, or the relentless counter-realities in Eggars's flash fiction - strikes me as too easy. The hardest thing is to extrapolate from the real into something original, not to be original by sidestepping the real. I'm not against all surreal flights of fancy - I liked Arthur Bradford's "Dogwalker", for example - but I admit I prefer the writers who avoid it, for example Tobias Wolfe. I don't want to get polarised about this (I do like Saunders, and occasionally love him), but I'm uneasy about the relentless infiltration of fantasy tropes into literary fiction. (I'm just one of those people: as soon as a ghost, a miraculous occurrence, a post-modern conjuring trick, a metatextual irony, appears in a story, my heart sinks.)

(a) Isn't that stuff partly the result of the film era and the Coover dictum -- i.e., you should write stuff that can only be written? (I think this is an idiotic dictum, for the record, but I do understand why modern-day writing would select for people interested in only-in-fiction tricks.) But then more importantly:

(b) Can you defend this "relentless infiltration" line? Like I said, it's certainly a trend, and it's one associated with the highest-profile young writers today. But it's also a "trend" in the opposite sense -- it's a limited cadre. I mean, can we get past just saying "relentless" and "everywhere" and actually justify this idea that "everyone" is doing it? Because so far as I can see the bulk of fiction, high-lit and low-lit, remains as traditional as ever.

I think it might be even harder to sidestep the real and make it work for an audience who are only familiar with the real.

(And since "making it work" is a writer's job and not "keeping it real"...)

and hardly anyone would say that cream soda thing like that.

Arf. Saunders plays with those sorts of constructions all the time, yes. So can people like Wallace and Baker, when they want to. So does whoever writes The Gilmore Girls. Maybe I've been spending time in the wrong places, but so far as I know people often talk that way. It's normal, is what it is.

someone give us another weird attempt at vernacular we can argue over.

18. I think people could be encouraged to read through: Wearing "author" t-shirts, much like band t-shirts

And maybe George Saunders heard me, because check it out: go to reignofphil.com! You can buy Reign of Phil t-shirts! I have just purchased one.

I got the wig t-shirt, though, and got to be overjoyed when I came across the relevant part of the text. I guess for my high-lit t-shirt I will just have to get started on a Steven Millhauser Neighborhoodie. (Possibly it will say: "Rose Dorn / Rose Dorn / I am / forlorn.")

"Cruel freight" made me laugh.

x-post. I'm all for the Looney Tuney direction, not because of the anti-TV meme, but because the story seemed like a spirited amalgam of Twain and Barthelme.

"CommCom" was also pretty fucking solid.

Definitely the closest thing to Barthelme we've got going these days.

outtakes!

new collection:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=br_ss_hs/104-8034997-6351146?platform=gurupa&url=index%3Dblended&keywords=saunders&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go

i wonder what path george's career trajectory will take and how he will be remembered?

civilwarland seemed much better than pastoralia, however

NOSTALGIA
by GEORGE SAUNDERS
Issue of 2006-04-10
Posted 2006-04-03

The other day I was watching TV and it occurred to me that I’ve become a prude. The show in question was innocuous enough, nothing shocking—just an episode of “Hottie Leaders,” featuring computer simulations of what various female world leaders would look like naked and in the throes of orgasm—but somehow, between that and the Pizza Hut commercial where Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson engage in some “girl-on-girl” action in a vast field of pizza sauce, something snapped. I know what the problem is: I’m old. I came of age in a simpler sexual time.

Back in those ancient, prelapsarian days, “girl-on-girl” hadn’t even been invented yet. At that time, “girl-on-guy” had only recently been discovered. I remember my parents and their neighbors standing in the yard with a pair of crude human figures made of wood, trying to work out the details. Sometimes a couple would get all worked up and forget where things were supposed to go, and the husband would have to call a friend—only phones were new, too, so sometimes you’d go over to visit a pal from school and there’d be his dad, just standing there naked, phone in hand, totally flummoxed. Women could get pregnant from merely watching a kiss in a movie! Girls, or at least the “good girls,” would go to movies blindfolded. I remember once, in fourth grade, I had to get engaged to a girl whose coat I’d brushed up against in the cloakroom. Those were simpler times, but, in some ways, I think, better times.

Same deal with violence. I remember how stunned we all were when the Cain-and-Abel thing happened. What, what? we kept saying. He bludgeoned his brother? With a rock? I remember the first time a severed limb was shown on TV. People were running out of their houses screaming. And it was just a fake leg, in a cartoon! Imagine how horrified those screaming people would be now, when, for example, you can log on to the “Evidence of Evil” Web site and they’ll send you a boxful of bloody prosthetics, which you can reassemble into a crack-addicted whore, who will then emit some clues through her computerized voice box—and when you think you know who murdered her you enter the name of the killer on the Web site and, if you’re right, you’ll get to see a short clip of her making love with her killer moments before he hacks her to bits while she has a flashback of her mother beating her with a chair leg.

I mean, O.K., there was violence when I was a kid, sure, but nobody really talked about it. If you got strangled and dismembered, you just got up the next day whistling a happy tune and went down and did some riveting for the war effort. As for computer simulations, sorry, all we had was sketchpads and pencils. If we wanted to see what various female world leaders looked like naked in the throes of orgasm, we had to use a little thing called the imagination. Plus, all the world leaders were men back then, and, believe me, once you’ve drawn Richard Nixon naked and in the throes of orgasm you never have quite the same interest in using your imagination again, and every time you even see a pencil you get a little puky and have to sit down.

Whenever I talk to young people—like some of the teen-agers in my neighborhood, or this one toddler, Maxie, or even a couple of fetuses I run into occasionally—I say to them: Trust me, guys, enjoy your youth, because the level of sex and violence is going to continue to escalate, and, by the time you’re my age, the world of your youth will seem like a distant, innocent paradise. The teen-agers and the toddler, Maxie, sometimes they seem to get it, but the fetuses—well, you know fetuses, they’re arrogant. To them, it’s always going to be a soft gentle ride in a warm comfortable space. And I’m, like, O.K., smart guy, call me in nine months and we’ll talk. Or I will! You’ll just be lying there pink and newborn, with a terrified look on your face, apologizing to me with those little shocked eyes.

Things just keep getting worse. Why, I suspect that, in forty years, when I’m eighty-seven, I’ll look back at the present level of sex and violence and go: Ha! Ho-ho! You called that sex and violence? That was nothing. That was Puritanism and pacifism compared to now! But then I’ll have to go, because it will be Stripper Night at the old folks’ home, and I’ll have to find my costume and my back brace, but on the way there I’ll be killed by a mysterious old-folks’-home invader, who actually works for Fox and is committing and filming my murder for later broadcast on “When Codgers on Their Way to Strip Look Terrified.”

Same with music, though, right? I used to love music, back when it had melody and chords and lyrics. But now it has no melody and no chords, just thwack-thwacking, and they even seem to be cutting back on the thwack-thwacking, so now it’s sometimes just thwa, and, as far as lyrics, do you consider these lyrics?

Hump my hump,
My stumpy lumpy hump!
Hump my dump, you lumpy slumpy dump!
I’ll dump your hump, and then just hump your dump,
You lumpy frumply clump.

I’m sorry. To me? Those are not lyrics. In my day, lyrics were used to express real emotion, like the emotion of being totally stoned and trying to talk this totally stoned chick into sleeping with you in the name of love, which lasted forever, if only you held on to your dreams.

These kids today, I don’t know what they believe. I mean, I don’t even know what I believe anymore, but what I do not believe is that watching Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson roll around in pizza sauce is helping our youth as they go forth and try to figure out what they believe! Scientific evidence suggests that even the fetuses inside of mothers watching that commercial are getting (1) dumber and (2) little baby boners. I do not go for that. I think that when a fetus is in the womb it should just be floating around with its undersized arrogant head empty and its little nascent penis just, you know, inactive. We grow these kids up too fast, and, next thing you know, out come the Indian and the Chinese fetuses, and they start taking away the jobs of our homeland fetuses, and why? Because these foreign fetuses aren’t jaded. They’re innocent like I was, like my whole generation was, when we were fetuses, back in those long-forgotten idyllic days when American fetuses walked the earth like happy unsoiled giants, doing algebra and reading the classics.

And yet I don’t like the fact that I’ve become a prude. Life expectancies being what they are, I may be only halfway through my life, and who wants to live out half one’s life as a prude? Not me. I want to live out about one-tenth of my life as a prude, that last tenth, when I’m inert and confused and immobile anyway. So I’ve decided to start prude-proofing myself via a series of daily micro-immersions in sex and violence. Last week, for example, I sat on my couch looking at a bra for over an hour. Then I forced myself to watch a video of a duck being hit by a car. Then I tried listening to the sound of the duck on the video being hit by the car, while looking at the bra. Next, I turned up the sound, while looking at a slightly sexier bra. Then I watched the duck being hit while I ran my hand over the bra. Then I had my wife put on the bra, which was a very effective technique, because as I tried to run my hand over the bra my wife nailed me with an ashtray just as the duck was hit by the car—one of the best micro-immersions in sex and violence a guy could ask for.

And tonight is my biggest depruding test yet: I am going to, while hitting myself with a brick and begging my wife to walk by in her bra, watch an episode of “Dream Yer Final Dream!,” on which a contestant selected from a field of more than five thousand applicants will be granted his Final Dream, which, in this case, is to be beaten nearly to death with a tire iron so that Carmen Electra can come in naked and give him a lap dance in the last moments of his life.

I have high hopes. I know I can do this. If I succeed, our whole culture will once again be open to me. And who knows? I may even go see a movie.

and no, jaq, that's not my friend's interview. his will be in a much, much smaller publication. i will link it when it comes out.

for the record, i know this b/c before moving here, i read the relevent ile threads. not b/c i'm stalking anyone :)