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.