For some weeks now, in a pretense to professorial hipness, I’ve been using the TV show Gossip Girl as a sort of all-purpose pop-cultural referent with my students. Whenever I’m at a loss to explain a concept, I say something like, “This would be like on Gossip Girl, if Blair Waldorf told Serena van der Woodsen…” The ugly truth, however, is that I’ve never seen the show.My students seem to take this in stride, and to find it both hilarious and tragic that I imagine it to be a cultural touchstone for their generation. In fact, they tell me, it is more of a cultural touchstone for mine. Other teachers apparently share my delusion that Gossip Girl is the central televisual event of the lives of undergraduates. Meanwhile, the undergraduates order Six Feet Under from Netflix.So where, one wonders, did the Gossip Girl meme gain traction? I can’t answer for my colleagues, but Gossip Girl got my own attention through two roundabout connections with The New Yorker magazine. First, Janet Malcolm (of all people) penned an essay on the literary merits of the book series on which the show is based. Malcolm was critical of the TV adaptation, but noted, of the books, that adolescence is a delicious last gasp (the light is most golden just before the shadows fall) of rightful selfishness and cluelessness… I would like to go on telling Blair stories until they are gone.Then, Wallace Shawn – a great playwright and actor and the son of the late New Yorker editor William Shawn – landed a recurring role as Blair’s mother’s boyfriend. “The life of an actor can be very enviable,” Shawn told the New York Times this week. “If the phone rings and somebody says, ‘I see you as the leader of a group of aliens with enormous heads… I think that’s fantastic.”That its glancing acquaintance with these two writers was enough, in my mind, to establish Gossip Girl’s centrality to the zeitgeist probably says more about The New Yorker’s role as a taste-maker for the thirtysomething set than it does about the CW’s role as a taste-maker for teens. Still, the primetime hours have not been quite the same for me since The O.C. went off the air. Janet Malcolm, literary to the end, would have me fill them with Gossip Girl books, but with Wallace Shawn joining the cast, I’m tempted to brave her disapproval and start watching the show.
How else to feed her ceaseless compulsion to write — grab a headline, bang at those keys, send it out the door.
This is an interesting new slant on the classic literary dichotomy, is it not? How acceptable is it to work with real life?
As upsetting as it is for people close to the student who died to read 'Landfill', shouldn't we welcome this article as a response and critique of the growing frat culture? It could be seen as Oates flagging up the dangers of frat houses and serve as a warning to parents and prospective pledges alike.
That's the problem, though. I find it awfully tiresome that Oates would devote herself to warning people of the dangers of frat houses. What's next? A book about not taking candy from strangers? This story told as a cautionary tale brings nothing new to the table. The world is full of cautionary tales on this subject. That the story is exploitative only makes matters worse.
Agreed the story may not necessarily bring new things to the table as such, but they way it is written is a new dimension in 'frat lit', as it were.
Tom Woolfe's 'I Am Charlotte Simmons'; it attempted a portrait of frat culture and twenty first century campus life but it utterly spun it out to an overtold tale. Oates' style actually captures the breezy, come-and-go ethic of a frat house. Those 'snatches' of dialogue and testimony are excellent literary methods of showing the dangers of frat houses, whilst also bringing the entire habitat mentality, to the reader.
To me, that ability and talent legitimise and distinguish her yes, cliche, source of inspiration.
I see your point. Oates certainly has her detractors, but it's hard to ignore her impressive and wide-ranging storytelling ability.
I suppose my argument is that if 'frat lit' is narrowly focused on the shocking tales of excess and depravity of priviledged young men, then I'm not that interested in reading about it unless somebody can move beyond the agressor vs. victim dynamic to something a little more complex.
Oates rips her story from the headlines, but – without having read much about the actual events it is based on – I'd argue that she has simplified matters by making Hector Jr. be hellbent on being a victim and by making the aggressors faceless and one note. This oversimplification is likely part of what got her into trouble in the first place.
Actually, to just twist this debate a little, I'm curious: Does frat-lit and academic lit serve as a platform from which to explore modern life in metaphor?
(Currently reading 'Prep')
Mwah Mwah Mwel
Sure frat lit and campus novels could serve as metaphor for modern life, but I can't recall having seen it done convincingly. Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy these books. They're often quite entertaining. Lucky Jim anyone?
But in a world where the medium is the message, Landfill works in part because its prose is so good. You care for the Hector Jr. character and even more for his parents. I also admire Joyce Carol Oates ability to shift points of view — generally a no-no with short stories. Ripped from the headlines or not, Landfill is a worthy read.