Selfish Wanking and the Future of Literary Fiction
The new Harper's does its darndest to provoke that ever-shrinking lit crowd to limp-armed blows (if we can get them flinging roundhouses with those bicepless arms, we can be the new London of lit gossip and rumor-mongering- have you seen Marty's teeth?) with its cover article, a novella-length character assassination of Jonathan Franzen under the guise of a defense of experimental fiction. I refuse to do your work for you, so if you're looking for sparknotes here, you'll need a trough of liquor before I flick too many more keys. Let me go all Reader's Digest on you instead- Marcus wants Franzen-the-pundit's (not the novelist's-he illustrates his magnanimity by praising The Corrections on several occasions) head- he believes that the recent tsunami (hey, by lit crit standards) of attacks on "difficult" fiction have alienated even those most likely to pick up a, say, Ben Marcus novel (in the interests of transparency, I failed to make it past page 32 of Marcus's one novel, as at that point he still hadn't mentioned Flannery O'Connor [aside: did you know that Killdozer once released a single with the touching lyrics, "Lupus killed the life of Flannery O'Connor, she wrote many books before death came upon her"? I didn't think so] Notable American Women). Franzen, according to the man who would be experimental king and who is certainly not jealous because he says that quite plainly at the end of the piece, had to wrestle with his lit demons and ultimately found that in his deepest heart of literary hearts, he was a giver. He would deliver entertainment as a gift to his readers. He would not punish them with needless difficulty. He would further the cause of literature by offering more people what they want. He would smash the elitist paradigm (that puts Ulysses, that unreadable river of diarrhea, at the top of its lofty heap), and bring back the casual reader.

Marcus is having none of it, but here's the cheap irony- his attack on entertaining fiction and defense of unreadable masturbation is one of the most entertaining essays of the year. Long live the defense of selfish wanking!

The Sound of Silence
So let me see- Tom Delay has been indicted. Bill Frist is under investigation. Mike Brown has disgraced himself in front of a Congressional committee after disgracing himself on the job. The military's lies in the Pat Tillman case are being revealed. George Bush's approval ratings are at an all-time low. Karl Rove's participation in the Valerie Plame fiasco could be made public any day now. And the Democrat who has seized this moment to bring down the most disgusting regime in American history?

By the way, I'm just wondering- is the entire life work of Michel Foucault simply a rationalization to bugger little boys in leather?

Dear Bob Forrest,

It’s somewhat daunting, being the first Bay Area in-city resident to see you live since the Thelonious Monster hey-days, to write about your set last night at Cafe du Nord. I dislike that venue intensely, but your solo acoustic set was refreshing compared to the bands that attempt high volume rawk there.

Your take on Newman’s “Louisiana” was so good it made me like the song even more, and I’m a pretty decent Newman junky. I expected “Rainin” to be your hurricane tune, but the cover was enough. “Cereal Song” was excellent, and your build up (the stories of your adventures as a drug counselor) was spot on. “Stormy Weather”, with your son on guitar, was better than the recorded version. “Off Street Parking”, the best breakup song ever, was first rate, and hey, we all forget lyrics. I threw you the last line when you asked for it; thanks for the nod from your perch. It was odd that more in the crowd didn’t know “You Come and Go Like a Pop Song”, but there you have audiences in 2005; unaware of one of the best records of our lifetime. The finale of “Sammy Haggar Weekend” was so damn riotous it made me sad I hadn’t seen you in the Berkeley Square days, when certain Areans caught you frequently. I liked the two new songs as well; you said you’re going to record and then practice, but I’ll wait another five years for a new record. Take your time.

Your set, with the commentary and the tunes, was good fun. Normally I would have tuned that banter stuff out and fondled waitresses, but there you were, alive and delivering. I don’t know why you haven’t brought the full Monster up here, but it sounds like you have a full plate, and music seems to have taken a back seat, as it should, as staying clean matters. It matters more for you, as you’re one of the best songwriters going, but even non artists need to catch a break. Some of the set was a bit too Dean Martin-esque for me. It was cool coming home with those Bicycle Thief tunes in my head. I’m gonna listen again all this week, and I won’t be disappointed about what you left out, only anxious for you to gear up and blow the doors off this godforsaken burg. You and the band can stay with my friends, tell them what assholes they’ve been...

Dick Dodsworth

Short Attention Span Friday
Fun Facts Gleaned From a Night of Comcast OnDemand Television Viewing Viewed to Quiet Those Getting Louder Voices Coming From the Walls of My Empty Home

Junior Kimbrough has 28 children, and he isn't even a member of the Saudi Royal Family.

Fat Possum honchos can giggle it up with R.L. Burnside about the time R.L. shot a man in the back of the head and only had to serve six months, tricking the judge into believing that somehow a shot to the back of the head could be delivered in self-defense.

Junior Kimbrough paid his band members $3.25 per diem on his European tour.

T. Model Ford has very few teeth. He did not pick up the guitar until he was 58, when his wife left him.

Cedell Davis had malaria, polio, malaria again, and was later trampled by a crowd desperately trying to escape gunfire in a small club. His body is nearly useless to him, but he relearned the guitar by turning it upside down and developing a slide style with a butter knife.

Johnny Farmer is convinced that when he finally relented and made a record, his subsequent bad health was payback for his willingness to play for somebody other than himself.

R.L. Burnside's grandson played drums for him.

Junior Kimbrough dissed Bono. "U2? Me too? Whatever," was how he greeted him.

Junior Kimbrough called Iggy Pop "lollipop" when they toured together.

Marc Bolan played part of a 1972 concert sitting yogi style.

T. Rex played "Summertime Blues" as an encore, and it did not suck. Astonishing.

T. Rex's bongo, maracas and tambourine player is shockingly handsome.

T. Rex's teenage girl crowd looked to be having the longest orgasm in video history.

I believe in nothing

Jonathan Lethem just won a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, thereby forever tarnishing that cute, always-in-quotes adjective. Good, not great, and far from genius. In other news, Bob's in town Sunday night. I can't believe it. I'm kinda numb. I never enjoy meeting/seeing people I admire. Maybe he'll bum a cigarette.

Contingency Theory and the Need for Some Quiet
Mark Costello's "Big If" is about the futile desire for control and the insatiable need to believe that contingencies can be anticipated and met. They can't be, and aren't, in this novel about Secret Service agents and gaming programmers, both of whom desperately try to outwit ahead of time those who would foil their seemingly unfoilable plans. Blurbers went wild with this one, as nearly everybody whips out the obligatory Pynchon or DeLillo reference, Franzen and Wallace slobber, and The Economist says it should be stamped with The Great American Novel on the cover. Costello examines complex systems unfathomable to the average asshole on the street and suggests even the geniuses devising and unraveling those systems can't get their minds entirely around them, and given the warpspeed increasing complexity of modern life, that probably explains at least part of the fawning praise. But Great American Novels have plots, and this one doesn't kick in until the very end of its 350 pages. It's far more concerned with establishing character and having those folks briefly meet in its climactic scene. It works for me as a behind-the-scenes docu-drama of Secret Service agents and as an occasionally funny satire about certain aspects of modern life, but it does not exactly carry you along with its forward motion. And the frustration a computer programmer feels when he cannot anticipate how gamers will take over his best laid plans does not help me understand the frustration I feel when I can't get my 4-year old to stop screaming, "Poopyhead, poopyhead" at the top of his lungs for the third consecutive dinner. I much preferred when that programmer's wife, a real estate agent to the ultra-rich in New Hampshire, finally loses it when one of her trophy wife clients refuses to commit to yet another perfect new house. So maybe, once again, it's just my petty domestic concerns that keep me from relating to the real patterns shaping modern life. Now, if I could only figure out what Byzantine network controls my sinus cavities...

Never Trust a Memoirist
Never trust a memoirist. I can never believe the conversations delivered verbatim, especially if it's a first-time memoir. Was he thinking of writing a memoir and going home and writing this stuff down? If he were thinking of writing a memoir, doesn't that change his own behavior, the things he says, the way he interacts with people? I can never believe the self-deprecators, not knowing whether it's a tone adopted for a reader's maximum empathy. And every memoir has scenes in which other people say very flattering things about the memoirist, which always hits a discordant note with that modest tone, as if everybody else thinks I'm fabulous but I'm too shy to say so. And then of course there's the content, a seemingly never-wavering tale of parental abuse, neglect, alchohol and drug abuse, rehab, pink clouds, wagon-falling, the love of a good person and redemption. Let's face it- the only reason to pick one up is for the sordid tales of degradation, as each memoirist has to top the antics of the previous one. Personally, Kathryn Harrison's "The Kiss" should have been the end of memoir history. She blew her own dad on a regular basis when she was in her early twenties. I mean, come on- she wins.

But they keep coming and you have to read something, so I picked up and consumed two of the best reviewed "my parents are fuck ups so watch me try and survive through the redemptive process of writing about it" efforts, and both were fairly entertaining. Augusten Burroughs' "Dry" is the follow-up to "Running With Scissors," which I have not read, but which apparently recounts in some detail how a pedophile fucked every orifice on his body with great intensity and frequency. "Dry," as you've probably guessed, is his story of alcoholism, his advertising colleagues' intervention, his subsequent time in gay rehab, his attempts to stay off the sauce, his conflicted relationship with a former lover dying of his AIDS, and well, you get the picture. Burroughs is funny and he closes stories well. He knows a good kicker and delivers on it. I didn't learn anything, but his yarn at least hints at verisimilitude, and that keeps you reading along without getting terribly itchy or turning on the Giants game despite their 6-run deficit. You could do worse.

I had read a long New Yorker excerpt from Nick Flynn's book, "Another Bullshit Night in Suck City" and I remember thinking at the time that having your old man walk into the homeless shelter where you work was at least a reasonably original take on the "dad fucked me up by never loving me enough" theme. In all fairness, Flynn does tone about as well as you're gonna get in this genre. His mom blew her brains out when he was about 20, his dad roamed the city where Nick lived on a 40-year bender and the author had his share of physical, emotional and romantic maladie, but unlike Burroughs, we don't get collapses into self-pity. The brooding and torturously long nights of self-reflection with his own bottle of Nighttrain are kept mostly off the page. We get images, mostly delivered chronologically, from his parents' courting in the late 50's to 2003, never more than a few pages in length, as if memory can do no more than produce a few words here, a rumor there, a snapshot here. Flynn's father haunts him as a shadow, sometimes far from his conscious mind but never disappearing long enough to stop the chinese water-torture of longing and curiosity. When they finally do meet again there isn't an ounce of sentiment, which fits, given Flynn's almost poetic detachment to the onslaught of troubles that are his life. You get the feeling that his damage is quiet, and he has no grievances to file with the courts of wayward parents. Perhaps he just feels compelled to finish the book his father claimed was just about to come out of him his whole life. I don't know. But for a guy who started this by saying you shouldn't trust memoirists, this is about as close as I'm going to get to loaning one money.

Defenestration Blues: Vineland Turns Fifteen

I know few readers who think of Thomas Pynchon as a California writer. Scholars who revel in Californiana are biased toward classic West-texts – Ramona, The Octopus, The Grapes of Wrath – and often refuse mention of Pynchon as part of our geographical canon, though he is, and high on the list of achievers.

Pynchon’s first California novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is the apex of conspiracy tracts, and it surveys modern America’s horrors, from the military industrial complex to Jacobean drama revivals. The novel’s guide is Oedipa Maas, a heroine of patience and adventure who glides in and out of doomed scenarios with a California girl's grace. Whether traveling west on San Francisco’s Fulton 5 bus or being serenaded by the garageless garage band The Paranoids, the reader's empathy is firmly for Oedipa, and this makes the nonsense Pynchon proposes genuine because it affects her being.

Vineland (1990) is far richer, funnier, and wide ranging than The Crying of Lot 49, but there are few direct comparisons, other than the vibe, which is important to Pynchon books, because the vibe is where he gets you hooked.

At the heart of Vineland is the turning of Frenesi Gates from a budding radical into a compromised government agent, working under the tutelage and spell of the cassanova-esque Brock Vond, federal prosecutor. Frenesi and her co-horts, including DL, a female ninja (ninjette) with iron will and strength, formed the film collective 24fps at Trasero College (south of Orange Co., north of San Diego) to document the struggle, the revolution and the movement that was the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Frenesi, post entanglement with this group, births Prairie, a spitfire daughter, whom she abandons in a heartbreaking post-partum spell, and it is Prairie’s quest to find her mother, now underground, that moves us through Vineland, though it is not that simple a narration.

Pynchon has a lot of fun with set pieces on our beaches, high up the 101, and in the Bay Area, where The Crying of Lot 49’s Mucho Maas makes a welcome cameo. In Vineland, Pynchon breaks in and out of scenes with fleeting characters, tells wicked jokes (“When your mother stops giving head to stray dogs”), and turns important encounters anyway he wants. Pynchon gets away with this because, I think, readers want him to. I empathize but don’t understand those who dismiss Vineland, because even in the midst of the book’s madness – aboard the Hawaiian airline where Zoyd Wheeler (Prairie’s dad?) plays keyboard to a tikki-ed out cabin; in the Tokyo whorehouse where DL mistakenly applies a lethal ninja combination; or to fictional Vineland itself, where Billy Barf and the Vomitones regale the patrons of the Cucumber Lounge – Pynchon lets out slips of prose that are devastating, and the best by a living author.

I’m thinking of a couple great scenes, one in which Zoyd returns from the beach with baby Prairie – she has fallen asleep in the sea breeze; and another with DL at her cabin compound, where she listens to the clink of heavy rocks submerged beneath a nearby stream. When I come across these solemn, peaceful lines of prose, I’m floored by their beauty and power, and because they serve as a break from the page long run-on sentences, it keeps one from having to put the book down. Pynchon knows what he’s doing, and though he’s completely able to turn out fare ala Henry James, he won’t and shouldn’t. We need mad men like him writing novels because rewards are there for readers willing to indulge him.

Vineland is hard to categorize, and hard to debate in light of Pynchon’s other work, which is universally regarded as superior. For all my admiration of Vineland, it just might be a lengthy, singular pun on George Lucas’s film “The Empire Strikes Back.” I’d hate to think Pynchon is putting me on, but if one is to be had, best it’s done by a master rather than a hack.

New Word Friday
Crimping House- A low lodging-house into which men are decoyed, afterwards plied with drink and induced to sign articles as sailors, or to enlist as soldiers.

Hail Bronstein

Slag the Chronicle all you want. If you are not reading McHugh's daily journal of his 400 mi kayak trip from the Smith River to SF, I don't want to know you. It's the best thing going in news right now, and today McHugh hit Humboldt State Park, where yours truly spent four nights sleeping in and under a 300 ft. redwood only weeks ago.

HACKING AT SLOP

If you missed it, the San Francisco Giants not only imploded on the field, in the clubhouse, and in the front office this season; they even self-destructed on their flagship radio station. I won’t get into the absurdities of the Barry watch, in which management desperately tried to keep up with the cryptic comments emanating from some Beverly Hills bunker announcing the latest return/no return news on the all-Barry website. I won’t slobber on about the failure of veteran players to rise to a Bondsless Giants squad that has made the palace of PacBell a yawning morgue for cell phone ringtones and soggy, impotent garlic fries. I’ll stay away from management decisions that have left the faithful groping for bottles of Wild Turkey snuggled deep in the back of the cabinet, untouched since the era of Johnny LeMaster. What I’m here to talk about is slop-hacking, PC rhetoric, the wrath of God and hardball capitalism. Let Aguirre be my eternal judge.

The story begins thusly: the Giants home on the radio is KNBR, a 50,000 watt station that reaches north to Oregon, east to the Sierras and south to the immoral confines of Isla Vista, home of the UCSB Gauchos. One night, after another aesthetically repulsive home loss to the Colorado Rockies, radio talk-show host Larry Krueger, an 8-year KNBR employee, went on the air and vented some pent-up frustration, denouncing “brain-dead Caribbean players hacking at slop nightly” and insisting that manager Felipe Alou’s brain was made of Cream of Wheat. When told the next day of Krueger’s remarks, Alou was livid, arguing that as a young player coming up in the south he had to put up with all kinds of nasty racist comments, and he was not going to stand for it now that he was in a position to call the bastards out. KNBR suspended Krueger for a week, and the media in the Bay Area began sniffing race scandal blood. Meanwhile, Krueger offered to meet with Alou and apologize. Alou refused, insisting that while he did not want to see Krueger fired, people from the countries that comprise the Caribbean "were offended by that idiot. This guy offended hundreds of millions of Caribbeans." A few days later, things appeared to simmer down, but Alou was still boiling over. In an interview with ESPN’s “Outside the Lines,” which aired right before Krueger was to be reinstated, he went Old Testament. He called Kruger “this messenger of Satan, as I call this guy now,” and justified his reason for refusing to meet with Kruger this way: “I believe there is no forgiveness for Satan." And while reporters dug deep to explore Krueger’s reputed youthful obsession with Black Sabbath, a midnight raid to excavate his backyard revealed no bones of eaten children.

After Alou’s “Satan” comments aired, the next morning’s radio hosts, Brian Murphy and (ex-Giant) F. P. Santangelo, were exploring whether the manager’s response was just a bit over the top. Yes Krueger had screwed up and deserved to be punished, but was he really an agent of Beelzebub? At that moment, their young producer, Tony Rhein, hoping to bring a little levity to what was an awkward time for the new morning hosts and trying to put a little mocking sting in Alou, interjected two “samples”: a Dana Carvey SNL church lady cry of “Satan!” and a South Park sound bite from an episode that included a weigh-in before a fight between Jesus and Satan. It was over in seconds (the soundbite that is- no word on the length of the battle between the divinities). That night, KNBR Senior Vice President Tony Salvadore posted a short announcement on the radio’s website announcing the immediate dismissal of Krueger, Rhein and 16-year veteran programming director Bob Agnew. "The segment, featuring inappropriate comedy sound bites," Salvadore wrote in the statement, "demonstrated an utter lack of regard for the sensitivity of the issues involved and a premeditated intent to ridicule Felipe Alou's commentary…KNBR deeply regrets the comments and actions of these individuals, which do not reflect our beliefs or values as an organization. We would like to express our deepest apologies to Felipe Alou, his players and the Giants' organization for this offense to the Caribbean community." This missive was placed on the website at 10:15 p.m. What in the name of Jehovah were the talk show hosts going to say the next morning, less than eight hours later, with both their immediate boss and their producer out on the street?

Well, Murphy and Santangelo, who had been with KNBR less than a year, tried their darndest to do radio ballet. It was obvious that they were devastated by the firings, especially that of Rhein, whom they could not stop praising. They also knew that the man who had fired their friends was the man who had hired them and could have their own heads on a block if they went too far attacking management for the decisions. The majority of callers, however, swung verbal mallets. Most attacked the firings, and their two main theories for the cannings can be summarized as such: 1) KNBR laid down for the ultra-liberal Berkeley/SF PC Nazis because it did not want to deal with an assault on the station by the militant wing of the Rainbow Coalition, and 2) The Giants organization demanded the firings to support Alou and, and KNBR laid down. Callers had very few kind words for anyone, and most were seething with outrage. You could hear the spittle dripping from the corners of their blood-drenched mouths.

Esteemed and despised local media personality Gary Radnich was due to take over KNBR’s 9:00 a.m. slot, and Murphy had been insisting all morning that Radnich’s experience and insight would lead us out of the relativist wilderness and into the promised land of moral clarity. Radnich prefaced his remarks with about 14 different qualifications and then stated unequivocally that the Giants organization had nothing to do with the firings. Radnich tied Salvatore’s decision to the fact that KNBR's parent company, Susquehanna Radio Corp. of York, Pa., had been up for sale for several months. That made Tuesday morning's attempt at comedy, at least in the ears of the powers-that-be in York, more than a harmless mistake. “It's another log on the fire,'' Radnich told his listeners, suggesting that if Alou thought KNBR was teasing him and rallied community support, an FCC investigation could hurt the sale of Susquehanna, which operates 33 stations in eight markets. ``You're talking licensing, you're talking millions of dollars,'' Radnich said. ``This is business. And in the end, business wins. That is why Larry Krueger is not with the station anymore.'' Radnich refused to blame the Giants, but he did say that Alou’s “ranting and raving are the primary reason this thing reached the point that it did.” He never explained exactly how the licenses were suddenly at risk, but by the end of the day, callers had themselves a new villain, and his name was Felipe Alou. Krueger, in the meantime, had been morphed from a zealous lout who had revealed his latent racism in the heat of a convulsive verbal moment to the Mario Savio of sports radio, a victim of intolerant PC thinskinners and callous corporate bigwigs.
When Alou heard about the firings, he said, “I feel bad about people being fired. It wasn't my intention, but I didn't start it and I took a stand. It was their decision," he said of the station. "Hopefully, they understand that people are not going to sit still and be put down like that. In the USA, I don't believe there is any room for that." He did not explain, however, how or why it was OK for his organization’s radio station to keep hell’s chief on board. Perhaps Krueger was the tempting snake in the Garden, luring dormant racists up off their lazy boys to eat from the tree of hate. Even theological interpretations, however, weren’t enough for the godless Bay Area, as a poll on the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, taken the day after the firings, showed. Only 21% of the respondents said that Krueger should be fired, while 68% said that termination was an overreaction. KNBR callers continued to scald Alou in the days that followed, while the Giants and KNBR management went quiet, desperately hoping that some SF supervisor would make his monthly egregious faux pas, and we could all go back to hating our secular targets of animosity.

Some three weeks later, the game of black and white hats isn’t so easy, so if you’re looking for ultimate judgments, go watch the 700 Club. Yes, Krueger’s “Caribbean” comment was racist, and if he had been fired immediately (which he probably should have been), the uproar would have been far less intense than it ultimately was. He wasn’t fired, however, but that did not stop Alou from seeking outlets (he went on the local Spanish TV station to attack Krueger in addition to his ESPN interview) to vent his frustration in Biblical terms, all the while insisting he did not want Krueger let go. Perhaps Alou’s support of free speech also applies to denizens of hell, and he was simply trying to let truth win in the public forum, but he never made that clear. The vehemence of his attacks, his unwillingness to meet with Krueger and accept his apology (and perhaps educate the man) and his insistence on Krueger’s satanic connections stole fuel from his legitimate outrage. Everybody understood why the man was pissed, but fewer and fewer felt comfortable supporting him as his mouth continued to roar from the dugout pulpit.

Maybe Radnich was right, and it was all about money. Three weeks after this whole sordid mess broke, however, I can’t help wondering how it would have played if the Giants were above .500 and in first place (as I write, the Padres are one game below .500 and 5 ½ games up in the NL West), instead of stumbling along in 4th place in the weakest division in Major League history. Krueger’s frustration with the wildly underachieving Giants pilfered his judgment, and he went public with something he might secretly believe but would never have aired had the team been winning. I suppose you could also argue that losing actually breeds such ugly sentiments, digging into the darkest recesses of the subconscious and planting the darkness, but I’ve always tried to keep Freud out of my baseball. Winning, however, can be a pretty good band aid.

In some ways, the whole Krueger affair has been illustrative of the Giants season- one dumb move after the next, with good judgment and timely speaking decidedly missing in action. So, three guys are out of a job, Felipe Alou has lost the respect of many of his former fans, KNBR’s reputation is stained, and I’m sitting here still trying to figure what the hell happened to the season.

You know, maybe I do have a solution to this whole mess- why don’t we all just blame Barry? If he had been around, everyone could have been focusing their antipathy on his barcalounger, denouncing his cream and cleared accomplishments, and abominating his every breath. Hell, we’d all be too tired to stay up for late-night talk radio, and with Barry around, hey, maybe we just might be creeping up to that .500 mark. And let’s face it- if ever there was a messenger of Satan…