What About Genre, What About Horror?

Essays
March 9, 2010 | 1 book mentioned 50 6 min read

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coverGenre, genre, genre, whole days go by when I am asked of nothing else, especially those moronic questions about horror that should have been swept out of civilized discourse at least thirty years ago: Tell us now, if you can, for we are really terribly curious about this, why is it, do you think, that reasonable people should pay good money to be, well, frightened? What, you know, can the appeal of such… unpleasantness… actually be? And on a more personal note, please, we’re all so curious… if you wouldn’t mind… what scares you? Okay, in reverse order, then: pretty much the same kind of thing that frightens you, what did you think I’d say, giant lizards? And, moving on to the first question: What are you trying to suggest, that you are not, have never been, implicated in this particular transaction? How certain are you, anyhow, that what you call “unpleasantness” is not a necessary, even crucial, part of our experience? Maybe you should lock yourself up in your heart long enough to work out your actual relationship to matters like shame, loss, envy, panic, brutality, greed, insecurity, loneliness, failure, whatever you find particularly unpleasant. Because that, dimwit, is where you live, especially if you really hate the whole idea of familiarity with such crappy, low-rent feeling states.

Let’s be honest, down there in the gutter is where most of us live better than half the time anyhow, probably a lot more than half. And if we are talking about those states of consciousness kept on back-burner low-simmer, we have to jack the figure up to maybe ninety per cent of the time, maybe ninety-eight. At this point, some impolite character like me comes along and says, It’s too bad you find this stuff so unacceptable when it takes up so much of your life, hmmm, couldn’t you maybe revise your category stances and define all this prime-time, tight-focus actuality in a different way? Because let’s face it, you don’t spend your life hang-gliding from one emotional peak to another, do you. The only way you recognize an emotional peak when you are fortunate enough to experience one is that it feels so different from the rest of your life, hmmm, let’s make that little noise again, hmmm, it’s so expressive of almost unwilling mentation. Why, we could say, it’s almost as though we were designed to be struggling and limping our way through the lowlands and gutterscapes, it’s like, you know, that’s the point, the struggling and limping, the gutterscapes so foul so fragrant. The point. The more you take in, the more you see. Shame shock blood pain grief suffering… you might even say, that’s the good part.

Oh, not really. Please. If that weren’t so perverse, it’d just be silly.

Um. Well, yes, perverse, I agree, but not at all silly. Yes, really: the good part. Meaning, the room where you and your life sit opposite each other in the dark, blinking and squinting, hoping the grimace on the blood-smeared face across the room is a brave grin. Or “plucky,” if that’s the way you think.

Well now, come on, that’s completely ridiculous. That’s just… genre, is what that is. And you accuse us of thinking in clichés!

Okay: genre genre genre, here we go. Crime novels and horror stories huddle down here in the gutter, right?, while real literature lives in the fragrant uplands and on the radiant peaks where plotting is at most secondary and life proceeds by instinct and intelligence, by fine intuition and a lively moral consciousness, owing nothing to formulae and the requirement to gratify the lazy reader’s expectations of suspenseful suspense and exciting excitement. One is disposable, the other immortal. However… well, just for beginners, let’s admit that literary fiction is a genre, too, shall we? Expectations guide its readers, that of respect for consensus reality and the poignancy of seemingly ordinary lives, of sensitive character-drawing and vivid scene-painting, of the reversals and conflicts characteristic of the several sub-genres of literary fiction: the academic novel, the comic novel, the adultery novel, the comic academic adultery-novel,  the experimental novel, the novel of foreign travel or inward journey, of unexpected encounter, of breakdown, of alcoholism, of youth, of middle age, of a hundred different things so well-known and encoded that the fonts used for the titles and the authors’ names tell you as much as the flap copy.

You know what else those fonts can tell you? This isn’t an exact science, let me admit, but they suggest how many copies the publisher thinks he is going to sell. It’s all there, right on the jacket: this book is a challenging yet comforting work of fiction in which the sensitive and ironic young protagonist experiences painful yet comic difficulties writing his first novel in a French fishing village. Soon, pages of his manuscript disappear from his desk and begin to turn up in the locations they describe. We hope to unload at least ten thousand copies of this well-written, pallid piece of post-modern, post-Jamesian crapola, but five is about what we expect. Title and author’s name “charming” in crumbling white letters, sans serif, all lower case, title just below jacket center and to the left, author’s name two lines down, tabbed farther left and irregularly spaced, some letters slightly askew. That says: five is about what we expect. The author will soon find that he no longer has a two-book contract.

Which is to note that publishing companies tend to signal complex decisions about marketing in ways both deliberate and inadvertent. Bookstores organize their inventory by sorting them into categories, and publishers try to make it easy for them. Genre jackets feature bright colors and embossed lettering, the author’s name in immense fonts bannered across the jacket bottom underneath some thematic kabuki. That’s how you know they are crime novels, all that vulgar hoopla on the jacket, even the “good taste” crime jackets look crass and shiny. In bookstores, you spot them right away, and that’s the point. Genre fiction came into being because publishers discovered from the pulps that there was a market for it, and it stays viable because it’s like food, people keep buying books by Robert B. Parker and Michael Connolly to get the same delightful taste in their mouths over and over, as if the books were made of maple walnut ice cream. (I’d say that people bought three decades’ worth of John Updike and Philip Roth novels for the same reason, and that a completely different set of readers have kept returning to William Gaddis and Thomas Bernhardt for an earned anticipated nourishment that cannot really be compared to ice cream.)

coverNow, as fantastically reliable as he was in delivering the desired goods, Robert B. Parker grew awfully soft in his later years, but Michael Connelly has remained true to his original impulses, to put on display the underbelly of L.A. while tracking an idiosyncratic detective’s solution of a complex crime or series of crimes. While remaining a very reliable and pleasurable crime writer, however, Connelly never rises above that category. Because Connolly is both wholly serious and honest about what he does, he would find the idea of “rising above his “category” risible. He should, anyhow—he’s earned that much, the right to an absolute respect for his own work. It is worth noting that both Parker and Connelly are rooted in Raymond Chandler, who may be the only American crime writer ever really to turn genre crime fiction into art, and he managed to do it only once, in The Long Goodbye.  He knew he’d done it, too: you can feel it in his letters, the evolution from an earlier edgy, wary defensiveness into, late in his life, a self-doubting, self-questioning master’s sense of accomplishment. Though Ross Macdonald came very close a couple of times, none of the writers who followed along after Chandler ever wrote anything as resonant, complex and sad as The Long Goodbye. None of them, not even Macdonald, ever could, in large part because they were all using a borrowed template that grew thinner and thinner with every generation.

Macdonald, Parker and Connelly worked or work in a genre that provides convenient situation-patterns, a condition that is made possible because the designations  “crime” and “mystery” identify and to some extent predetermine the content of the fiction they cover. Crime writers and academics of genre fiction like to denigrate horror by pointing out that unlike “mystery,” “western” or “romance,” “horror” specifies no content beyond the emotion it is intended to arouse. I think this absence of specificity is not at all a limitation but the reverse, a great enhancement. That no situational templates are built into horror grants it an inherent boundarilessness, a boundlessness, an inexhaustible unlimitedness. If the “horror” part is not stressed all that overtly and the author spares us zombies, vampires, ghosts, haunted houses, hideous things in bandages, etc., what results is fiction indistinguishable, except in one element alone,  from literary fiction. That crucial element could be called point of view, or angle of vision. It is whatever dictates the way in which everything is seen. For further details, return to my first paragraph. Consult your heart, go on, lock yourself in and think about loss and loneliness, about grief, these hard, necessary facts. Where do you live, really, in what kind of world? The question can never be answered in a way that is not unsettling.

[Image credit: Windell Oskay]

, who won a Grand Master award in 1998, is the author of many novels. They have been translated into nearly every existing language. His new book, A Dark Matter, is available now from Doubleday.

Essays

Crimean Rites

Essays
April 15, 2014 | 1 book mentioned 7 min read
1. It’s February 4, 1937. The poet Osip Mandelstam is in Voronezh, a provincial city deep in the Russian steppe. He has one year left to live. Voronezh is a place of exile, set between “the throaty Ural” and the “heavy-shouldered Volga.” In his exile, Mandelstam dreamt of the South, of “the breaches of round bays, the gravel and the blue/and a slow sail, continued by a cloud.” It’s a dream of Greece, and of the Black Sea – an old dream for Mandelstam. Twenty years before he began a poem “Insomnia. Homer. Tautly swelling sails.” But it’s also a dream with a degree of specificity. Without a doubt, Mandelstam is thinking of the Crimea. In part, as Joseph Brodsky notes, this is because of “Russian poetry’s traditional regard for the Crimea and the Black Sea as the only available approximation to the Greek world, of which these places – Taurida and Pontus Euxinus – used to be the outskirts.” But in part it’s because of Mandelstam’s particular relationship to the place. He spent part of the Civil War there, and returned to it periodically with his wife Nadezhda. For him, the Crimea became a sanctuary as well as place of myth. In his second collection, Tristia, he writes: The thread of golden honey flowed from the bottle so heavy and slow that our hostess had time to declare: Here in melancholy Tauris, where fate has brought us, we are not at all bored - and glanced back over her shoulder. On all side the rites of Bacchus, as if the world held only watchmen and dogs, not a soul to be seen - the days roll peacefully by like heavy barrels: Away in the hut are voices, you can't hear or reply. “On all sides the rites of Bacchus.” Mandelstam was more correct about the Crimea’s past than he could have known. Today the Crimea is talked about as just a territory. In the news it’s an abstraction, a piece of land kicked like football between nations. But in literature and history it lives a life of its own. 2. Who does the Crimea belong to? First of all, to the sea that made it. Seven thousand years ago, the Black Sea was much lower than it is today. Then a waterfall tumbled over the Bosporus, and the waters began to rise. The flood cut the Crimea off from the mainland – all the way except for a narrow isthmus called the Perekop. Ever since, it has been a rocky island on the shores of a sea of grass. The steppes belonged to the nomads. Grass meant horses, and freedom. The steppes stretched north, from the mouth of the Danube to the Siberian Altai. Across the centuries they were home to various nomadic confederations and tribes: Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Pechenegs, Cumans, Mongols, and Kipchak Turks. The legendary Cimmerians predate them all; the Cossacks are still there today. At times, the nomadic tribes made their home in Crimea too. But the mountainous peninsula was also a refuge. = It drew in emigrants from the South: exiles fleeing persecution and castaways from larger migrations. In the seventh century B.C., Greeks from Miletus and the rest of Ionia settled there in search of land, founding cities all along the coasts. Thracians and Scythians followed, driving the Taurians, the native inhabitants of the peninsula, into the high places. In the Middle Ages, the Karaites, Jews from Babylonia who rejected the Talmud and any authority beyond the Torah, arrived. With time, they adopted the language of the neighboring Turks. In the 19th century, the Karaites began to claim that they weren’t related to other Jews at all, but that they were instead descendants of the Turkic Khazars. In the 16th century, a Flemish ambassador to the Ottomans named Ogier de Busbecq was amazed to discover that Goths were living in the Crimea. They were the last descendants of the Germanic tribes from the Dark Ages of the West. They still spoke the language of their forefathers. Apparently they got lost on their way to sacking Rome. Busbecq recorded some of their words: "handa" for hand; "apel" for apple; "reghen" for rain, as well as a song that no one can understand to this day. For a time in the 15th century, the peninsula was home to a breakaway sliver of the Byzantine Empire. After the Fourth Crusade, the Genoese took control of the old Greek ports, growing rich off the slave trade. It was at one of these ports, Kaffa, that the Black Death entered Europe, when the besieging army catapulted dead bodies over the city walls. Slavery was long crucial to the life of the Crimea. The Crimean Khanate was home to some of the largest slave markets in Europe. The Khanate was founded in 1449 by Tatars, deserters from the Golden Horde. Its first Sultan, a descendent of Genghis Khan, built his palace at the place to which a snake had fled after being nearly killed by another snake. The Sultan had been beaten in battle; he took this as an omen that he would nonetheless thrive. For generations the Tatars raided the southern steppes in search of captives, going as far as Poland and the mouth of the Danube. In Ukrainian and Russian, “to go to the Crimea” once meant “to be enslaved.” With time, the power of the Khans declined, and the Cossacks raided their cities. A century of warfare with the Russian Empire followed. Catherine the Great finally annexed the Crimea in 1783. After the annexation, the Crimea took on a new identity. At once Russia’s Riviera and of its many Siberias, it hosted banished poets and aristocratic ladies on vacation. Pushkin spent some of his exile there. At the palace of Khan Girai he found the inspiration for his poem about the sad lovers of Bakhchysarai. Adam Mickiewicz devoted a cycle of sonnets to it, poems in which he is alternately a pilgrim, a poet, and an exile. Chekhov nursed his Tuberculosis in Yalta. Mandelstam sat out the Civil War in Theodosia, ancient Kaffa, in which he set one of the sketches in The Noise of Time. For them, the peninsula was a door to the South and the East. Their works figure it as an alternate Russia, at once Mediterranean and oriental. Of these writers, Mandelstam was especially keen on envisioning a Russia whose culture was rooted in that of classical Greece. To Mandelstam and other like-minded Hellenizers, the Crimea belonged to ancient Greece as much as modern Russia. The soil itself said as much. In the 19th century, when archaeologists began opening the earthen burial mounds scattered around the peninsula, they discovered that the Scythians and Greeks had deeper ties than chroniclers like Herodotus would have led them to believe. Inside the kurgans they found the treasure the Scythian chieftains had taken with them to the afterlife. Many of these were vessels and implements made of finely wrought gold, most likely made by Greeks who lived in one of the cities of the Bosporan Kingdom. In these gold ornaments, a whole mythology and history unspools wordlessly. Griffins devour stags, warriors string their bows and mend their wounds, heroes ride mythological creatures, horses nurse their foals, lions crouch in bushes, and bards play songs under the shade of celestial trees. On an ornamental quiver given to a boy as a coming-of-age present, a Greek king gives the boy Achilles a barbarian-style compound bow. On top of a comb, rival kings fight on horseback. Some are dressed in the flowing pants of the nomad and some in the battle armor of Greek hoplites. But even if the goldsmiths of Panticapaeum and the other cities of the Crimea fulfilled their commissions faithfully, that doesn’t mean that relations between north and south were always peaceful. One story told by Herodotus and confirmed – in part – by archaeology captures the fraught relation between Greeks and Scythians, nomads, and town dwellers. It concerns Scyles, king of the Scythians. Scyles’s father was a Scythian, but his mother was a Greek. The Scythians lived in tents and drank fermented mare’s milk. The Greeks lived in cities and drank wine. Scyles grew to prefer he Greek way of life, but, because of his peoples’ prejudices, he had to keep his love of poetry and wine and all things Greek secret. Most of the time, he ruled as a Scythian, but one month out of every year he would go to Borysthenes, a colony of Miletus on the northern shores of the Black Sea, to live as a Greek. While there, Scyles dressed in Greek clothes and worshipped in the Greek way. He even had a Greek wife. But one day, he decided that this wasn’t enough: he wanted to be initiated into the cult of Dionysus and take part in the Bacchic mysteries. The worshipper of Bacchus ate raw meat like an animal and temporarily went mad. One of the local Borysthenites saw Scyles in his frenzy, and informed his subjects. Scandalized, the Scythians rebelled. Scyles fled, but he was betrayed and beheaded. 3. So what exactly were the rites that cost King Scyles his life? They celebrated Dionysus not as a god of wine, but as a guide through the underworld. In this, he was aided by his ally, Orpheus, the mythical poet who braved the terrors of Hades to bring back his wife. The cult of Orpheus was a secret religion. Its adherents were sworn to secrecy, and as a result our knowledge of it is highly fragmentary. Most of what we know about the cult of Orpheus comes from archaeology: a burnt papyrus, an inscription on gold leaves found in an Italian tomb, and a series of bone tablets recovered from the ruins of Borysthenes – modern-day Olbia in southern Ukraine, across a short stretch of sea from the Crimea. The exact purpose of the bone tablets is unknown, but they seem to have been some kind of membership token for the initiated. Some of their owners used them to write short messages. The name of Dionysus recurs frequently, as do those of other gods. Orpheus is mentioned once. Sometimes the messages are longer, but no less enigmatic. One plaque reads “peace-war; truth-falsehood.” Another has on it “Dionysus” and “body-soul.” On a third, someone has scribbled bios-thanatos-bios, life-death-life, and then, to complete the sequence, aletheia – truth. These plaques were discovered by Soviet archaeologists in the 1950s. But thirty years before, Russian poets seems to have intuited their existence. Alexander Blok, Mandelstam’s friend and rival, figured the Russians as Scythians, calling to Europe with a “barbaric lyre.” Mandelstam himself imagined a different past, a Greek one, writing of his home in exile: “The vines are alive like ancient battles/ Where curly horsemen are fighting in curving order.” In the time of Herodotus, Scythian and Greek met as equals in the Crimea. Twenty-four hundred years later, it still felt like a place outside the grasp of a single culture or epoch. Mandelstam’s poem that begins “the golden stream of honey,” ends like this: Golden fleece, oh where are you now, you golden fleece? All the journey long the heavy sea waves were loud, and leaving his ship, his sails worn out by the seas, full of space and time, Odysseus came home. (Translations from the Russian by Peter France) Image via Argenberg/Flickr
Essays
| 1 book mentioned 7 min read
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Essays Sport

In Play – Runs: Baseball and the Internet

Essays Sport
November 3, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 11 22 min read
I.  From 200 to Infinity One of the popular fallacies of the internet is that it is "like cable TV on steroids."  Just as cable had expanded the range of channels from 12 to 50 to 200, the internet would expand the number of information outlets from 200 to something like infinity.  The problem with this analogy is two fold.  For one thing, infinity is completely different from 200, so much so that it renders the analogy useless.  For another, it ignores a key component of the web – namely, its accessibility.  Cable TV was one-way information – the TV gave you information, and you took it.  Occasionally, maybe, one might appear on a Larry King-style call-in show, or find himself wandering across the stage on The Price is Right, but it was highly improbable.  With the exception of public access TV, a limited-range outlet at best, the TV viewer was exactly that and little else.  Not so with the internet, where the proliferation of user-populated sites – from YouTube to Facebook to blogs to personal sites to message boards – means that the primary producers of the internet are the viewers themselves. It didn’t always seem that this would be the case.  When I first encountered the web, back in the mid-1990s, I had no idea what to make of it.  This was in the pre-Google days, and though there were plenty of search engines available to me, I wasn’t quite sure what I was searching for.  As a result, I turned to trusted sources from what we now think of as the old media.  I visited the New York Times website, the Boston Globe, and ESPN.com.  The latter provided my first “aha” moment on the web.  Here, at my disposal, were all sorts of facts and articles – updated every few hours! – on all the sports teams I wanted to know about.  The Syracuse Orangemen, the Washington Redskins, the Boston Red Sox.  It was like ESPN, but more so. At the time, it certainly seemed like the internet would be a lot like cable TV.  At the very least, it would be run by the same people.  Even when I started to learn about sites that weren’t connected to any corporation, to read blogs and the like, I still figured it was only a matter of time until all of this turned into something corporate.  Maybe it would play out like radio, itself first a two-way form of communication later harnessed and controlled by corporations.  Maybe someday The Clash would be writing songs about pirate websites and such. It didn’t happen.  At this point, it seems doubtful it will.  Instead, corporations sprang up to make money off the fact that anybody could write anything they wanted on a website (and eventually even appear on audio and video) and also to make money at the point of access – a continuing threat to the freedom of the web.  They monetized the web (parts of it at least) without corporatizing it.  The infinite number of niches and chasms remain, and while some sites have come to stand for expertise or quality through their association with some old media entity or individual, a sort of survival of the fittest remains on much of the web.  To be an expert, to know something, means only to prove it to your audience.  The web is fundamentally changing how we experience much of life, and nowhere is this more apparent to me than how we experience sports. II.  J.D. Drew as Baseball Litmus Test A few weeks ago, as the Major League Baseball season was coming to an end, Theo Epstein, the general manager of the Boston Red Sox, appeared on a local Boston sports talk radio show to discuss the season and the upcoming post season (You can listen to the audio here).  It wasn’t long before Epstein brought the conversation to one of the show’s favorite topics, Red Sox right fielder J.D. Drew.  Drew is a controversial figure in Boston, and to a lesser extent, around the league, as he embodies the dichotomy that exists between how two divergent groups of fans and commentators see the game.  As one of the posters on the popular Red Sox fan site Sons of Sam Horn put it, “It's reached the point where I can judge someone's knowledge of baseball based on how they view JD Drew.” To get an idea of what these people meant by these comments, we need a bit of historical perspective.  By now, even the most casual baseball fan is aware of the so called “Moneyball” concepts, popularized in Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball, about Billy Beane’s work running the Oakland Athletics – that the economics of baseball have forced teams to find value in players other teams have disregarded, and for most, statistical analysis has become the tool they use to find these players.  As a result, certain once underappreciated statistics, such as On-Base Percentage – the measure of how often a player reaches base by hit, walk or hit-by-pitch – have replaced the more traditional measurements of greatness, such as Batting Average or Runs Batted In.  Those who appreciate the value of statistical analysis are often called students of sabermetrics, a word derived from the acronym "SABR," for the Society of American Baseball Research, a group dedicated to studying the game. One of the tenets that sabermetricians adhere to is that the best thing a batter can do for his team is not make an out.  This doesn’t necessarily mean get a hit, but rather get on base and avoid being thrown out once you do so. In the field, of course, the object is reversed – convert as many batted balls into outs as possible.  To be a complete ballplayer, one would need to field his position well. All of which brings us back to J.D. Drew.  Few players in the game today are better at not making outs at the plate and converting outs in the field than J.D. Drew.  He consistently ranks near the top of the league in OBP, and this season, he was second among all outfielders in the American League in OPS (which measures on base percentage plus slugging percentage, the latter a measure of power hitting).  He’s also a solid fielder with above average range playing in the quirky and spacious rightfield of Fenway Park.  In addition to these skills, he’s also a talented baserunner, scoring a very high number of runs as taken as a percentage of opportunities. Based on this, one might reasonably expect J.D. Drew to be a fan favorite in Boston, respected for his good play and admired for his non-out-making prowess.  But this is not the case.  In fact, he’s arguably among the least popular players on the team.  The radio show on which Epstein appeared scapegoats Drew for his frequent injuries (he typically plays less than the average number of games) and for not driving in enough runs (only 67 in 2009).  They call him soft or aloof, in part because he sits out games with minor injuries rather than playing through the pain, and in part because he has a calm demeanor.  You aren’t likely to see Drew attack a water cooler with a bat or slam his helmet down and curse after grounding out.  And so they say he doesn’t care.  In fact, it’s so often said about Drew that it’s become a joke on the SoSH site.  Whenever Drew hits a double, someone on the site will remark, “If he cared more, he’d have hit a homerun.” Why this disparity between reality and the fans’ perception?  Why don’t more people recognize the greatness of a player like J.D. Drew?  The answers lie at the very heart of how we interact with sports and what we want sports to be.  As the web and mobile technologies make their way increasingly into the world of sports, the nature of being a fan or an expert is changing, as well.  As we’ll see, this change is hardly unique to the world of sports. III.  Sports Talk Radio:  The Fresh Take Radio is the medium of failure.  My limited exposure to political talk radio is of the guest ticking off the multiple failures of the opposing political party.  “Barack Obama failed to get his health care bill through Congress in any meaningful form.”  “Congress failed to pass Obama’s healthcare bill.”  Sports radio, I can attest, is positively obsessed with failure. It’s a cliché that baseball and the radio were made for each other.  Every hack writer and pundit has waxed rhapsodic on the charms of Harry Caray calling Cubs games on the porch, of Vin Scully’s dulcet tones filling the midsummer air.  Like most clichés, there’s some truth to it.  Baseball is slower and more contained than a “continuous flow” sport like basketball, hockey or soccer, and more open to description – due mainly to its lack of action – than football.  There’s room in baseball for storytelling, and radio broadcasters can use that room to describe the game, to fill in its gaps and to reveal its secrets. What baseball wasn’t made for was sports talk radio. A confession here:  when I’m in the car, I do enjoy listening to the idiocy of sports talk radio.  I imagine the pleasure is similar to listening to Rush Limbaugh and saying “wrong,” over and over again.  There is pleasure – the pleasure of superiority – in listening to someone who you believe knows less than you do prattle on about a given subject.  Perhaps it’s the host’s failure I revel in. For my money, the best sports radio program is The Jungle with Jim Rome. Full of bluster and arrogant to the point of parody, Jim Rome manages to execute the delicate balancing act of mocking the incessant parroting of call-in shows (he gleefully refers to his listeners as “clones,” much as Rush Limbaugh’s listeners self-identify as “Dittoheads.”) while simultaneously promoting the very qualities the show espouses to critique.  Rome welcomes calls and emails from listeners, each missive layered with his own brand of jockish patois.  A call might contain an oblique, abbreviated reference to the caller’s hometown (“Jeff in C-Bus, what is up?”) as well as certain bizarre Rome-isms that callers perpetuate (use of the word “war” to mean “I’m in favor of,” for instance). The Rome show is built around the call of the day and the email of the day (emailers frequently send in humorous emails in the name of some disgraced athlete, or even, in a few cases, in the name of an idea itself), challenging listeners to craft their best Rome-esque “take” on any subject they choose, often in the form of a series of insults hurled at the fan base of another team.  This leads to most callers memorizing their takes, as Rome will disconnect anyone he believes to be reading a pre-prepared take.  Have I mentioned yet that the Rome Show airs smack in the middle of the workday for the average American?  Where do the clones find the time? It’s the absurdity of the Rome Show that makes it so entertaining.  Rome’s personal cadence is so specific that it only plays on radio.  His forays into TV have been relatively forgettable with the exception of the infamous episode in which he provoked football player Jim Everett to attack him after repeatedly calling him by name of (female tennis star) Chris Everett (more on this in a moment).  For those who have never heard him, imagine a monologue delivered with the cadence of a Fugazi song, complete with numerous dead air pauses.  If anyone can vocalize an ellipses, it’s Rome.  When coupled with his trademark disdain for the audience, the combination can be lethally entertaining. The Rome Show, more than any other sports radio show, examines sports culture as much as it does sports themselves.  Much of the time, the actual game serves as nothing more than a starting point for a longer discussion of fandom.  After a recent Monday Night Football game between the New England Patriots and the Buffalo Bills, Rome spent the opening segment of the show discussing not the fumbled kickoff that ruined the Bills’ chances, but rather the behavior of one fan after the game (the fan took out his frustrations on the fumbler by carving an obscene design on the player’s front lawn).  While Rome is almost always critical of these troublemakers, one can’t help but detect some tincture of amusement beneath his contempt.  After all, without obscene lawn carvings, he and his clones would have to talk about the game itself, which they don’t want to do. Rome discusses baseball less than he does the other sports.  When he does talk about it, it’s more gossip column than box scores.  He’ll talk about A-Rod dating Kate Hudson or Manny Ramirez being suspended for steroids.  Just this past week, when the World Series was in full stride and Pedro Martinez had just returned to face the Yankees for the first time in years, Rome was busy talking about Andre Agassi’s drug use.  A previous show talked at length about Magic Johnson’s new book, rather than the upcoming series.  Rome isn’t as interested in baseball as he is in failure, and in that, he’s not alone. You’d think baseball would be perfect for talk radio, as it’s all about failure, something talk radio loves more than air itself.  In baseball, a great offensive player makes an out roughly 60% of the time.  That’s incredible failure right there.  Couple in the unique “walk off” aspect of its structure, in which the other team gets an equal chance to come back, no matter the score, and there’s the recipe for real, gut-punch level losses.  That’s the stuff of talk radio bliss.  But baseball lags well behind football and basketball in the trinity of sports talk fodder. In part, this is simply the result of baseball’s status as the least popular of the major sports, garnering smaller TV audiences every year, its long season causing fatigue in the casual fan. But there’s something else at work here, and it has to do precisely with why J.D. Drew remains a figure of some ambivalence in the world of baseball. As demonstrated by the Jim Rome show, sports talk radio is an intellectual-free zone.  Despite the intelligence level of those running the shows (likely quite high, in most cases), the fan base is decidedly anti-intellectual, and the audience, rather than the host, sets the agenda.  The discourse on the shows is to varying degrees sexist and homophobic.  Even the most progressive shows – Dan Patrick’s smartest guy in the country club shtick, for instance – have trouble transcending the hypermasculine rhetoric of sports.  Jim Rome’s lone transcendent TV moment came from insulting a football player by calling him the name of a female tennis star, after all.  Additionally, sport’s infatuation with militaristic pomp and corporate involvement (“Guests appear via the Subway Fresh Take Hotline”) create a climate not unlike the Republican National Convention at most sporting events. This comes as no surprise.  Much of the discourse about sports is couched in a conservative ethos, regardless of the political inclinations of those in the dialog.  This stems, I think, from sport’s status as a relatively pure meritocracy.  The best players rise to the top based on nothing but their performance on the field. It was long ego exposed that so much of the announcing in sports is inherently racist:  black players are often called “articulate,” while white players usually get credit for being “gamers” or for their exceptional hustle.  It’s assumed a white player would be well-spoken, while black athletes must be more naturally athletic than white ones.  Even this latter “compliment” is actually an insult, implying that black athletes' success stems from natural ability rather than work ethic (This isn’t unique to sports, of course; Joe Biden once referred to Barack Obama as articulate).  With this in mind, it isn’t surprising that most sports rhetoric embraces another aspect of conservative thought, a disdain for intellectualism. It is radio’s defiance towards intellectualism that creates this climate for J.D. Drew bashing.  To give Drew his due is to allow the cerebral back into the discussion, and that’s a losing game for the sports talk radio caller (or host, for that matter).  After all, what’s left to say when one side argues with facts and figures and the other with insults and names?  If we actually talked about the game on the field, what would Jeff in C-Bus do? IV.  “In play – runs:”  Baseball was made for the Internet Moving to the West Coast killed baseball on television for me.  East coast games start at four in the afternoon, long before I leave work most days.  To be honest, even the radio is out of the question.  I’m lucky to catch a few innings in the car on the way home (back when I used to drive to work) or as I make dinner in the kitchen, and then it’s the Angels or the Dodgers, neither team a favorite of mine.  Ten years ago, I might have been finished as a baseball fan.  But ten years ago, the fan didn’t have the resources I have at my disposal now.  Thank God for the internet.  Specifically, thank God for Gameday. Gameday is a browser-based program offered on the Major League Baseball website that allows one to follow a baseball game live via a series of graphic representations of the on-field play.  In plain English, this program tells you who is up, who is pitching, what the count is (how many balls and strikes) what pitches have been thrown and how many, and the result of each pitch.  In some ways, Gameday is the descendant of old telegraph systems that gambling parlors would use to reflect the results of a game in play, moving baserunners about a large board and reflecting balls and strikes and outs with colored light bulbs (such a system appears in the movie Eight Men Out). It may seem absurd to follow a game this way – you’re neither watching nor listening – yet to a baseball fan with little recourse, it’s a lifesaving invention on par with the telephone or whiskey.  And believe it or not, though it can feel soulless and dead, when paired with a game thread from a fan site like Sons of Sam Horn, it can be incredibly engrossing and fulfilling. Gameday watching, if one can call it that, is a strange thing.  In many respects, it is a poor substitute for watching the game or for listening to it.  It presents an incomplete picture of what happens on the field, a picture filtered through textual description.  As the ball is pitched, Gameday tells you whether it is a ball or a strike (each is color coded as well) or whether it has been hit in play.  If it’s been hit in play, it will say one of three things:  “In play – out(s),” “In play – no out,” or “In play – runs.”  Depending on the situation of the game, a blue dot – signaling a ball in play – can induce paranoia or euphoria.  Many are the times I’ve prayed to a God I don’t believe in for an “In play – runs.” Of course, this is where the incompleteness of Gameday becomes apparent.  “In play – runs” can mean a great number of things, depending on circumstances.  For instance, in a situation in which the bases are loaded with no one out, it might mean a grand slam or it might mean a double play producing one run and leaving two outs and a man on third.  Those are two radically different outcomes, both of which would be reflected with a little blue dot in Gameday. Yet Gameday also provides information that doesn’t appear on television or radio broadcasts.  For one thing, Gameday uses Pitch FX, a computer system that tracks the speed and movement of a pitch to determine what type of pitch it really is.  Compare this with the work of your average analyst who often calls a curve ball and change-up and vice versa, and one can begin to see the wealth of information that Gameday provides.  At the click of a mouse, the Gameday watcher can have just about any stat imaginable.  He or she can check back to see how a particular batter was pitched to several innings prior. By putting an absurd number of statistics and tools at a fan’s disposal, the internet makes several very important things possible.  First, it exposes many so-called experts as charlatans.  For instance, let’s say a manager decides to bunt a player from first base to second base in the fourth inning of a 0-0 game.  The announcer might say “That’s a smart baseball move.”  In the past, the average fan would have no way to know whether it was smart or not.  If it worked, it must’ve been smart.  If it didn’t, well… Now, that same fan can fire up his Fangraphs iPhone app and discover that the win expectancy of that play is negative.  In other words, the bunting team has a lesser chance of winning after the bunt than before it.  Stupid move. While I’d much rather listen to Vin Scully or even Dave Campbell than watch a game on Gameday, it has saved me from suffering through the Tim McCarvers and Joe Morgans of the world on many a night (Morgan is so terrible there was a website dedicated to having him fired).  These color commentators continue to play a role in the press box, but it’s one that must change with the times.  No longer do we need to rely on witchdoctors like Joe Morgan to tell us what makes sense and what does not.  We have a better way.  Which leads to the second thing the internet encourages – objective analysis. It is no coincidence that the rise of "Moneyball" and sabermetrics has coincided roughly with the emergence of the internet and the ubiquity of the personal computer.  While there were isolated statisticians and theorists toiling away with pencil and paper in the pre-wired era, the web has given those people powerful new tools and brought them together into meaningful groups.  In turn, it’s had an impact how the game is thought of at both the level of the fan and in the front offices around the league.  As a fan, sites like Sons of Sam Horn and their brethren give intelligent fans a place to discuss the team free from the constructs of a corporate radio channel, where the discussion must plunge inevitably to the lowest common denominator.  They’ve created a community where none existed before, a sort of virtual sports bar where everyone understood the value (and limitations) of OPS.  The internet is a sports fan’s utopia, a place where, for once, we can just talk about the game, without all that other crap. It isn’t hard to see the effect statistical analysis on the average baseball front office.  It’s as common now for a 35-year-old with a business degree and no on-the-field experience to be at the helm as is it for a grizzled former player or scout.  The industry has undergone a sea change, a transformation that is still underway.  The underlying principles are pretty simple – if we can determine who the best players are through statistical analyses, then with the right tools, anyone should be able to do it.  No baseball experience is necessary.  Carried to its logical conclusion, this idea leads to something still fairly unthinkable in the other major sports – a woman making the decisions about the players on the team.  The San Diego Padres recently gave serious consideration to Dodgers Assistant GM Kim Ng (They ultimately settled on Red Sox assistant GM Jed Hoyer), and it is likely that Ng will land a GM gig in the next few years.  This would have been impossible ten years ago, and in many ways, the internet and technology, by making the game knowable and quantifiable, made it happen. V.  Do Something:  J.D. Drew and Femininity There are few more frustrating moments in sports than watching a baseball player take a called third strike.  The player seems passive, his fate claiming him rather than the opposite.  “Do something!” the fans shout.  “At least if he’d swung he might have gotten a hit.”  And if that same player then walks slowly back to the dugout and gets his glove, not even pausing to curse or hit a water cooler, then that player might look like he isn’t even trying.  He might look like he doesn’t care. J.D. Drew takes his fair share of called third strikes – it’s the necessary byproduct of seeing lots of pitches – but what he doesn’t do is overreact, slam his helmet to the ground and steam in the dugout afterward.  He gets his glove, and he gets ready to play the field.  And this, it seems, pisses off a whole lot of people.  They see his selectivity as passivity, and, I think, they see this as being somehow less than masculine.  As proof, I'd offer the many homophobic and sexist insults hurled at Drew, but, really, I'd rather not. Baseball is unique among sports for many reasons, and one of the more important ones is that it is the one of the few sports (golf might be another one) where one can’t ‘try’ their way to greatness.  You can’t swing harder and expect to get a hit.  In fact, added effort often leads to worse play in baseball.  Pitchers overthrow, missing the strike zone badly.  Hitters flail at pitches they have no chance to hit.  In football, a player can “dig deep” and overpower the man on the opposite side of the ball, simply by brute physical force.  In basketball, you can out hustle the other team, finding a reserve of strength to dribble past a defender or out work someone for a rebound or a loose ball.  Not so in baseball, and I think this bothers a lot of people. We desperately want our sports to reflect the best of our society.  If you show up everyday and try hard, you can succeed.  Isn’t this why we celebrated Cal Ripken Jr.’s consecutive games played record?  Here was the embodiment of work ethic, a guy who showed up everyday.  It was baseball’s award for perfect attendance.  But I’ve always thought of Ripken’s streak with ambivalence.  How many times did he cost his team by playing through an injury?  How good was Ripken at sixty percent, and might the Orioles have been better off with a healthy player in his spot occasionally?  I see this at work, as well, where employees come into work with colds, work at diminished capacity and infect others with their germs.  Wouldn’t it have been better to stay home and recuperate?  I think it would be, but that’s the not the American way. J.D. Drew is the anti-Ripken; he sits out roughly a game a week, often at his own behest.  If he tweaks his ankle or pulls a muscle, he sits out rather than play through the pain.  The result is that he averages 130 games played out of a possible 162.  He doesn’t play unless he’s nearly completely healthy.  This earns him the label of being soft or fragile, not a tough guy.  It makes him seem almost feminine, and in sports, that isn’t a compliment. There are other aspects of Drew’s game that, at first blush, appear less than hyper-masculine.  For instance, he rarely dives to catch a ball in the outfield.  Some fans see this as soft, that he’s afraid to hurt himself by diving to the ground (Many baseball analysts judge a player’s level of effort by the dirt on his uniform).  Of course, the reason he rarely dives is that he’s often in position to catch the ball without diving (He gets to an above average number of batted balls for a rightfielder).  When he makes an out, he doesn’t throw a tantrum or sulk.  When he’s going well or when he’s in a slump, his demeanor is always relatively constant.  You’re not likely to see J.D. Drew instigate a brawl with the opposing team, as fan favorite Kevin Youkilis has been known to do on occasion. I think it's no coincidence that this year is the first season I've really appreciated Drew's talents.  This year I watched fewer games on TV than ever before.  When Drew makes an out on Gameday, his avatar just disappears, same as Kevin Youkilis or Derek Jeter or any other player.  When Drew makes a catch in right, I can't see whether he dove or not.  I can't see how dirty his uniform is.  It's easier to appreciate J.D. Drew when you aren't watching him, as so many of his skills come with the double-edged sword of frustration. This is also precisely why sports talk radio hates him – all of their analysis is based on what they can see and what their gut tells them.  To give J.D. Drew his fair credit is to admit that preparation and skill are more important than effort, that raw aggression isn’t worth much in baseball, that hyper-masculinity doesn’t reign on the diamond as it does on the gridiron or the court.  It’s also, I think, to acknowledge that there are real measurements for greatness in baseball, and that those measurements, with a bit of effort, are equally accessible to everyone – professional and amateur alike.  To acknowledge that is to admit that, for lack of a better phrase, you are full of shit. The internet has given birth to a new generation of sports expertise.  Drew Magary, writing on one of the web’s most popular sports blogs, Deadspin, theorized that we are seeing the end of “privileged sports reporting,” that is, reporting that relies on access to athletes, coaches and owners: Reilly assumes that, if you haven't been in a locker room, if you've never had access, then you can't possibly have any sort of valuable insight to offer on sports. This is wrong, of course. I'm pretty sure Bill James didn't set foot into a locker room before changing the fundamental nature of baseball scouting forever. He didn't need to see Rich Garces' tits in order to glean insight as to how he pitches (though I've heard Rich Garces' tits are AMAZING). Shit, he didn't even need to see him play on TV. In the same way that these privileged sports writers are now giving way to legions writing from the fan’s perspective (the way Bill Simmons -- now "Sponsored by Miller Lite" -- used to, as Magary points out), so too are traditional baseball experts ceding territory to upstarts with a spreadsheet.  Make no mistake, this is having a profoundly democratizing effect on baseball, both the sport on the field and its perception by fans. It’s even giving rise to a hybrid fan/expert, as countless message board posters use obscure stats like UZR and WARP, and learn to wield Pitch FX as a weapon.  These fexperts (a term I just coined) will probably never get on TV or radio as analysts (they might not be any good at talking, for all I know), but they’re making an invaluable contribution to my life as a fan.  They’re deepening my appreciation of the game, even as I get to watch fewer and fewer of the actual games themselves. The Red Sox were eliminated from the post season early this year, falling in three straight to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.  They held a lead for much of the final game, built, in part, by a J.D. Drew homerun.  The announcers were probably busy praising the Angels for “playing the game the right way,” ignoring that they would eventually win the series because of their superior plate discipline and control of the strikezone.  I wouldn’t know, as I was following along on Gameday. All I had to go on was a ream of statistics, some conversation with my fellow fans and the occasional – far too occasional – “In play – runs.” It was after that last game, a sucker-punch of a loss, that I realized how different my life as a fan is in the wake of the internet.  I still called my father and commiserated over the loss, but afterwards I turned to Sons of Sam Horn, and found multiple threads – each one pages long – dedicated to specific decisions in the game, which moments actually led to the loss and what could be done to improve next years team.  There were eulogies for the team (a tradition is to post the text of A. Bartlett Giamatti’s essay "The Green Fields of the Mind") as well as threads about the upcoming ALCS between New York and Anaheim (or Los Angeles or…wherever) filled with gallows humor.  But most of all there were dialogs and discussions based around facts as much as emotion.  Discussions where a fan could use his brain as much as his heart. The next day, the radio call-in shows were no doubt full of vitriol and disgust – who should be fired, who should be ashamed.  Meanwhile, I was thinking about what happened to Jonathan Papelbon’s secondary pitches.  Thankfully, there’s a place for me now, a place where all of us who recognize that J.D. Drew is a valuable baseball player can talk about the game free from the noise of the ignorant.  Is it a tiny bit elitist?  Maybe, but I prefer to think of it as I do sports – it’s a meritocracy.  If you don’t know what you’re talking about or you can’t back it up with some facts, take it elsewhere (I don’t even post that much on the part of the board dedicated to baseball, as there are so many people there who know more than I). Of course, getting most of one’s information through the web comes with a price.  Recently in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reviewed a new book by Cass R. Sunstein called On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done.  In the book, Sunstein explains that while the net has given us more opportunities to find the information we want, it’s also given us unprecedented ability to ignore the information we don’t want.   This creates, in his view, "cyberpolarization." Two sides of one issue move farther apart as they spend an increasing amount of time around their fellow believers. Certainly there’s some of this on the web with regards to baseball.  There are those who argue that the sabermetrics crowd puts too much faith in numbers, even those that are plainly contradictory to what their eyes tell them.  Others say that the rise of the statistical baseball fan has sucked some vitality from the game, that it has, as the basketball site FreeDarko.com put it, “[turned] an art into a science.”  One might point out that as statistical analysis has increasingly gained acceptance, the game’s popularity has plummeted.  I don’t think this is the case, but it’s certainly an interesting coincidence. But I don’t feel that experiencing baseball on the internet has turned me into a zealot.  On the contrary, I think it’s allowed me to become the kind of fan I always wanted to be – quiet, contemplative, cerebral and yet still occasionally irrational.  Maybe it’s because there are so many divergent opinions online – some of the members of Sons of Sam Horn continue to doubt J.D. Drew, for instance – and where each position is analyzed and cross-examined.  It seems to me that as the internet provides more and more tools to the average fan, it reveals more about what the fan wants from sports, and, in a larger sense, from the world.  One person might want tangible proof of something while another has faith.  One person might want to see the triumph of effort over skill or vice versa.  The greatness of the web, I think, is that it allows all of those people to have their say. In the end, fandom of every kind, might best be described by the signature of one of Sons of Sam Horn’s longtime members. “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” [Image credit: Wendy Harman]
Essays Sport
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50 comments:

  1. Nice essay, but the definition of literary fiction is far too narrow and far too self-serving. Much literary fiction, for instance, is just as plot-oriented and just as visceral as genre fiction, and I have no idea what Straub means by saying that literary fiction concentrates on things like “consensus reality.” Certainly Lolita or The Great Gatsby or As I Lay Dying or Invisible Man or Earthly Powers or The God of Small Things or White Teeth or The Robber Bride or A Suitable Boy or We Need to Talk About Kevin, to take some obvious examples by some very different literary writers, carry us quite a long ways off from the definition of the “literary genre” that Straub offers. I agree with Straub that there’s a weird resistance to taking the best horror writing as seriously as, say, the best detective writing is taken. Still, Straub doesn’t help anyone take horror fiction more seriously by trying to lock literary fiction into a little box of his own devising. He shouldn’t imitate the very narrow-mindedness he’s attempting to break while making his argument for, say, Stephen King or Shirley Jackson or Straub himself. If the best horror writers are as good as the best writers of the literary genre (a genre that doesn’t exist, or at least not in the terms that Straub describes), it’s because good writing can show up almost anywhere, by any kind of writer using any kind of approach.

  2. I agree that literary fiction is really another genre much like horror, crime, or romance. The trouble with any fiction writing is exactly what the last paragraph highlights. A reliance on prescribed elements that define a genre.
    Literary fiction enjoys a better reputation in terms of surface quality. The infallible reputation of the literary genre doesn’t mean it is infallible though. Literary grade fiction doesn’t suffer from an overuse of zombies, mummies or the odd rabid dog. Is does suffer on occasion from over wordiness, pretension and the shot gun blast of consciousness. The differences seem to be the amount of scrap in the heap.

  3. “Literary fiction” is a genre like “sci-fi” or “horror.” In “literary fiction” as in all genres, there are works that transcend and works that do not. Or: most of every type of thing is garbage, but some is really great. Walk the shelves of any bookstore and on any given shelf there are probably one or two books that you would like and a whole lot that are just cheap imitaitons of other works.

    It is easy to hold up “As I Lay Dying” and say, “See literary fiction doesn’t follow any rules”–but this isn’t a fair test. It is like when someone says the 60s are better than the 90s because Dylan is better than Creed. We can all pick great works and put them against terrible works to prove our point.

    The fact of the matter is that there are great works on every shelf in a bookstore. Often those works that transcend our traditional notion of genre are plucked out of it and placed in the “literary fiction” section anyway. Etc. Etc. Etc.

    I’m not defending genre, I’m just saying don’t be blind to the garbage all around you.

  4. My take on why horror is more denigrated than crime fiction (to say nothing of literary fiction) is simpler than Straub’s: because it specifically defies what he describes as “consensus reality.” Crime fiction, on the other hand–and even some sci-fi–can (and does) claim to represent the world we all live in, essentially unchanged, just seen from a different, darker, dirtier, more vulnerable point of view. It’s escapism that pretends it’s not. Horror, on the other hand, begins with the premise that the reality we’re all agreed upon is not the only reality–the parameters our materialist consensus has set out for it leave out many, many scary and important aspects.

    It’s easier for a crime writer to tell himself, or a crime reader to tell himself, that, even as he’s working within genre conventions, what he’s really doing is taking a hard look at reality; a horror writer doesn’t have that luxury, and his prestige will always, I think, suffer for it.

  5. DN, I think you should maybe read a little more carefully what I actually wrote. I never said or suggested that literary fiction is in bulk better than genre fiction. I think the opposite is true: precisely because genre fiction has some clear rules, the writers who do well in genre fiction tend to be good at following those rules, and deserve to be praised for that. I certainly didn’t suggest that literary fiction is better than genre fiction just because As I Lay Dying is a great novel. (Under your reasoning, by the way, Straub should have been disqualified from mentioning Raymond Chandler and forced to defend Tom Clancy.) All I said is that the definition of literary fiction offered by Straub is false, because he has given a definition that doesn’t begin to recognize the range of literary fiction out there. If you like, I’m happy to pick an example of bad literary writing that doesn’t fit Straub’s definition: for instance, almost everything by Joyce Carol Oates. This isn’t a very interesting game anyway, trying to define what is and isn’t literary writing or what is and isn’t genre writing. If you read the last line of what I originally wrote, you’ll see that you and I are mainly in agreement, and that you’re fighting with someone who’s on your side.

  6. First, God Bless you, Mr. Straub.

    People need to stop worrying about what categories things fit into and just enjoy them. Does it matter if you are frightened by Flannery O’Connor or Stephen King? William Gay or Peter Straub? If it works, it works. SO many universities are down on “genre” fiction, wanting to make us all into these literary giants. How many writers can make a living writing ANYTHING? Look at the best seller lists – what’s on top? Mystery, detective, horror, pulp, and yes, some lit too.

    People like Peter Straub fight to elevate dark fiction to a higher place, along with writers like Benjamin Percy, the aforementioned Gay, Stephen Graham Jones, Brian Evenson, Blake Butler, Mark Gaitskill, AM Homes, so many. It’s a fight we wage every day.

    In the end, I think all of “us” need to get along, lit and genre, high-brow and low-brow, and everything in between. Less exclusion and more inclusion. There is nothing wrong with reading Cormac followed by King followed by Pynchon followed by Grisham by Bradbury by Saunders by whoever the hell you enjoy.

    Read fiction in The New Yorker and Playboy and The Paris Review and Esquire. Just read, and turn other people on to whatever it is you’re really digging.

    My two cents, anyway. :-)

  7. Robin, you are right. I’m sorry. I wasn’t really respoonding to you, or anyone, so I shouldn’t have mentioned your comment. I apologize. I am an alright guy, I promise–just got carried away in my own bubble.

  8. You’ll have to count me on the side of people who don’t think it makes much sense to call “literary fiction” a genre akin to sci-fi or horror or anything else. All those other genres you can sum up pretty quickly and accurately and people will know what you are talking about. There is no way to sum up literary fiction that would include everyone from Borges to Kafka to O’Connor to Sorrentino to Barthelme to Bolano to Bernhard to (I could go on and on).

    This is not, I don’t think, a question of people “transcending” their genre, as DN suggests. It is more that the sub-genres of literary fiction do not fit together. There is really nothing that links a Borges story to a traditional domestic realism novel or a Oulipo literary game to a southern gothic story.

    Straub’s definition, which hinges around the idea that the work centers on “ordinary lives” automatically makes you think of a billion examples of literary works that aren’t about ordinary people.

    It makes more sense to say that “literary fiction” is a problematic term with multiple and perhaps conflicting definitions. Because what literary fiction really means is artistic fiction. So a work of fiction can be BOTH genre fiction and literary fiction in many people’s eyes. Raymond Chandler is often listed as a literary author or in the literary section of bookstores, but we would still call his work detective fiction.

  10. Lincoln, I think where we differ is that I would not class those authors you list as being in the genre of “literary fiction.” What I was trying to express was that there are tropes and expectations for popular, literary fiction just as there are with crime fiction and fantasy. That is what I was failing to say in my first post.

    You say you can’t sum up “literary fiction” as a genre that includes Kafka and Bolano, etc, but I think you would have just as hard a time classifying, say, “sci-fi” as a genre when comparing Gene Wolfe, Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler, Isaac Asimov, etc.

    There is good and bad of everything and the bad, or mediocre, ossify what was great about the good into cliches. All fiction, music, film, etc., does this. “Literary fiction” isn’t exempted just because Nabokov was awesome.

    Now, I recognize that maybe I am changing the meaning of some terms here, but when I hear the term “literary fiction” I do not think of Thomas Pynchon or Kathryn Davis or Lydia Davis. I think of the type of earnest, well-written book that does well as a movie. I’m sorry if I am being dismissive here.

    I guess the problem is that we would agree that writing within the tropes and confines of any genre is bad, but whenever a work exceeds those, it gets plucked out of the confines of that genre and not counted with its rank. It is like this:

    “Pickles don’t taste good,”
    “This pickle tastes good.”
    “Then it isn’t a pickle.”

    I don’t know why I am carrying on so–I don’t even read “sci-fi” or “horror” or any other “genre” fiction.

  12. dn:

    By what standard would you not classify them as such? Those authors (or contemporary authors like them) blurb each other, are studied together in classes, sit side by side on the literary fiction shelf of a book store, are published side by side in the same literary magazines, etc. If I read a genre fiction magazine I’m going to get that genre’s fiction and it will be fairly similar, but if I open a copy of McSweeney’s or Tin House I’ll find a wide range of writing akin to what I listed. Even the New Yorker, which has a (I think unjustified) reputation for being narrow and boring in its fiction still publishes people like George Saunders, Roberto Bolano and so on.

    I certainly don’t disagree that most of what is published as literary fiction or in literary magazines is crap though. Most of everything is.

  14. Well, DN you need to change that.

    Start with William Gay’s story “The Paperhanger” if that eases you in. Or just about any short by Mary Gaitskill. I’m sure you’ve read Flannery O’Connor (any short), and maybe Cormac McCarthy (The Road, Outer Dark, etc.)? If not, read them, they’re certainly dark and horrific. Brian Evenson (anything), Stephen Graham Jones (All the Beautiful Sinners), Blake Butler (Scorch Atlas), that’s a great mix of contemporary genre-benders there. Of course I’d personally suggest Straub’s Ghost Story, King’s The Stand or It (both very long) or The Long Walk (very short), Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. So many great books, no need to avoid them.

  15. A wonderful essay. For me there are often no clear lines between genres. In many ways genres are illusions. And what wonderful illusions they can be.

    Greg Gutierrez
    Zen and the Art of Surfing

  16. If I read a genre fiction magazine I’m going to get that genre’s fiction and it will be fairly similar, but if I open a copy of McSweeney’s or Tin House I’ll find a wide range of writing akin to what I listed.

    Not necessarily the case—for one thing, you may find a Borges story in a mystery magazine (say, Ellery Queen’s, back in 1948), and that issue of Tin House you pick up might have a story by genre writer Kelly Link (as did TH’s 2007 Fantastic Women issue).

    You’re just playing the usual game of pointing to the best of “literary” fiction—McSweeney’s and Tin House—and comparing them to some notional middle-of-the-road genre magazine, and then, shocker!, the best of A is better than some imaginary average example of B. And this rather leaves aside the fact that both the magazines you name do publish genre pieces as well.

  17. Nick:

    No, that is really not the game I’m playing. As I said above:

    This is not, I don’t think, a question of people “transcending” their genre, as DN suggests. It is more that the sub-genres of literary fiction do not fit together. There is really nothing that links a Borges story to a traditional domestic realism novel or a Oulipo literary game to a southern gothic story.

    My only point here is the term “literary fiction” is not used in the same way as the term “Sci-Fi” or “Romance” or whatever. What I’m saying is we are comparing apples to oranges. It is just a different kind of term.

    When Straub lists his definition for literary fiction he simply defines domestic realism. His definition doesn’t include magic realism, avant-garde fiction, southern gothic or any of the other styles that are grouped under the term literary fiction.

    I only used Tin House and McSweeney’s because they are famous and people would be familiar with them. I could name a ton of lower tier journals that would make the same point too.

  18. And just to clarify, I’m certainly not saying that this makes literary fiction automatically better than genre fiction. I’m saying the terms dont’ really compare and if anything the term literary fiction might be unfair and problematic, since great genre works (Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy, etc.) get snatched up and called literary.

  19. It would be nice if we could move beyond the tired idea that literary fiction is by definition all but plotless. As Robin notes, it’s just not accurate.

    Now if you’ll all excuse me, I need to go analyze the fonts on my dust jackets.

  20. Lincoln,

    I would suggest that those ton of lower-tier literary journals in fact do NOT publish stuff along the lines of Borges and stuff along the lines of domestic realism and Oulipo-based material and Kafkasque material, etc. Most of the journals I’ve ever seen have fairly strict aesthetic agendas, at least within particular issues. (Some, like Conjunctions, an issue of with Straub edited, have narrow agendas but at least alter those agendas on an issue-by-issue basis.) Not only are Mc and TH among the best and most popular, they are among the most adventurous—there’s probably a relation between those three attributes, of course.

    You are correct, of course, that literary fiction is a rather large umbrella of sometimes competing and sometimes parallel traditions. But so too is something people often call “speculative fiction”—which would also include some Borges, and some naked propaganda for the space program, and Robert Aickman, and Vonnegutesque satires, and Joyce Carol Oates (who publishes seemingly at whim, of course) etc.

    Heck, we can just narrow is down to “fantasy”: what do Lovecraft and Tolkien really have in common, traditionally or aesthetically? And they’re hardly the opposite ends of the fantastical spectrum either.

    Now, of course, there are genre magazines with narrow focuses, but there are also literary magazines with focuses just as narrow. That was my objection: you picked the magazines with the broadest “literary” focus and compared them to some notional genre magazine that would only publish a fairly narrow range. Actually existing literary magazines are almost all narrower in focus than mcSweeney’s; actually existing genre magazines are almost all at least somewhat broader in focus than what you give them credit for.

  22. Richard, thanks for the suggestions. I’ve read most of that stuff, or at least the obvious (Ghost Story, O’Connor, Gaitskill). I love Stephen King and think that the Dead Zone is one of the best novels ever written, period. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to read Cormac McCarthy, but that’s just my own thing. The other suggestions, I will check out. With horror fiction, my disappointment is that I can never find horror novels as satisfying as horror films, but maybe I am trying the wrong works. It seems that maybe one issue with horro fiction, at least in execution, is that there is a drive toward resolution or revelation that detracts. An in ability to leave ambiguous or unresolved. The beginning is alwasy so much more satisfying and horrific than the end. I would love for a horror novel to be able to not bring the plot to a conclusion, but leave it open. I don’t think this is a failing of horror as a genre but just a fact of execution. I imagine that publishers frown upon unresolved plots.

  23. I don’t think Straub is talking about just domestic literary fiction. He says “the several sub-genres of literary fiction,” and includes in that list “the experimental novel.” And while it’s true that it’s hard to draw a line between Borges and O’Connor and Fitzgerald, it’s also true that it’s quite easy to see in many experimental stories just how the author is nodding to the experimental styles of, say, Barthelme, Borges, or someone else. Even though the fiction I read is almost entirely what Straub would call “literary fiction,” I take his point — it has its conventions. And so do its sub-genres. Just because someone truly singular may come along and explode them every once in a while, that doesn’t make the general point less true.

  24. Lincoln, I think you are both very accurate in your comment and very inaccurate.
    You say:

    “Those authors (or contemporary authors like them) blurb each other, are studied together in classes, sit side by side on the literary fiction shelf of a book store, are published side by side in the same literary magazines, etc.”

    And this is precisely right. These are all indicators of a “genre” , specifically “literary fiction”. But, you might say, what are the tropes of literary fiction as a genre, such that Borges and Updike can be classified together? The truth is there aren’t any. Or, there are, but only such that can be stretched wide enough to be meaningless. Literary fiction is a genre because of marketing and nothing more. It is the same with mystery, horror, romance, etc. If I like x and y books sitting on the “Literature” shelf, then I might like z. The only thing that ties x, y, and z together is that their publishers think I will buy the other if I like the one.

    Look at it this way, how is Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man a science fiction novel? Well, you might say, it has time travel in it. But, so does Slaughterhouse-5. As well as The Time Traveler’s Wife. Are the last two science-fiction? Some people say yes, some people say no. But if I go to a bookstore, where am I going to find them? Time travel is a trope most associated with science fiction. But it does not define the genre. While science-fiction might have spaceships, ray guns, and aliens, etc., these things no more define the genre than a private eye and femme fatale define film noir. I mean, where’s the private eye in Sunset Blvd.? Where’s the femme fatale in The Night of the Hunter?

    The problem comes when, to take the film noir example, you try to redefine these films based on quality. That is, the only metric that would separate Sunset Blvd. and Night of the Hunter from Gun Crazy or Crimewave, is that the former are “great” films that transcend the genre and thus can no longer belong, while the latter are merely good examples of such genre. However, “great” isn’t a genre. The problem, though, is that it has been associated with literary fiction, such that quality is a defining feature of the genre. Which makes no sense, because quality (and shit) can be found in any genre.

    For example, what makes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road not a science-fiction book? The only thing is that it was marketed as literary fiction, and shelved in that section. That’s it. “Post-apocalypse” is a trope associated with science-fiction. There are good examples (Riddley Walker) and bad examples (Brin’s The Postman). But they’re all science-fiction, except when they’re not marketed as such.

    These pointless genre battles often crop up, I suspect, not so much as the defensiveness of genre fans (be it mystery, science-fiction, horror) to be taken seriously (which I do think forms a part), but more often literary fiction fans defensiveness to admit that their taste is more defined by marketing than by quality. That is, all genres have great examples and shit examples, but “literary fiction” is the only genre that defines itself solely as the former. But the truth is, its just marketing.

  25. Southern literature comes to mind as literary fiction that is incredibly narrow in scope, or at least as it is collected and marketed. I remember being very frustrated in college with Southern Lit–that is, you weren’t writing Southern Lit unless you had some folks in a station wagon dwelling on the blood of the earth and the history of a family’s fortunes after the Civil War. Reading lit journals that focus on Southern Lit (at the time) often felt like reading the same cliches over and over.

  26. Ryan, I think we are actually in total agreement here:

    And this is precisely right. These are all indicators of a “genre” , specifically “literary fiction”. But, you might say, what are the tropes of literary fiction as a genre, such that Borges and Updike can be classified together? The truth is there aren’t any. Or, there are, but only such that can be stretched wide enough to be meaningless.

    My point is that literary fiction is not a term like “horror” or “detective fiction.” It isn’t a genre term. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything really, but if it does it means something other than genre, namely a certain level of artistry. Again, I’m saying that it is problematic, but I don’t think claiming that “literary fiction” = domestic realism makes much sense.

  27. Nick: You are of course correct that there are literary magazines both big and small that have strict aesthetics. There are also literary magazines both small and big with very broad aesthetics. But the aesthetics are not merely domestic realism, there are journals dedicated to other styles. And in addition, literary authors will target there submissions by aesthetic so that their domestic realist story goes into journal X and their Saunderish satire goes into Y and their Barthelmeish experimentation goes in Z, etc.

    My question do dn and anyone else, is that if all the authors and journals we are discussing are not “literary fiction” then what are they?

  28. Lincoln, you say: “Again, I’m saying that it is problematic, but I don’t think claiming that “literary fiction” = domestic realism makes much sense.”

    I agree completely. Saying that is like saying science-fiction = aliens, horror = monsters, mystery = detectives. However, these latter views have often become the dominant and stereotyped view, such that, if I recommended Evenson’s The Open Curtain to friend saying that it’s one of the best horror novels I’ve ever read, they might reply that they don’t like zombies or Stephen King. Clearly, it’s their loss for not being an open-minded reader, but you can hardly blame them when “Horror” as such is always marketed as zombies and vampires and the Saw movies.

    The problem is that treating “literary fiction” as something different in kind to other genres reinforces the stereotypical, popularly received opinion that “genre x means y and z” while “literary fiction means good”. I think that “literary fiction” is a marketing classification and nothing more. But I also think that “horror” is a marketing classification and nothing more. Treating them as something else, the former is “quality” the latter is “genre” often prevents readers from reading great works that they wouldn’t normally.

  29. And in addition, literary authors will target there submissions by aesthetic so that their domestic realist story goes into journal X and their Saunderish satire goes into Y and their Barthelmeish experimentation goes in Z, etc.

    I can’t say that I’ve noticed too many authors who write domestic realism and satire and experimental fiction and and and…I’d love some names. Not being sarcastic here; I am always eager to find ambitious authors, especially of short stories.


    My question do dn and anyone else, is that if all the authors and journals we are discussing are not “literary fiction” then what are they?

    It is literary fiction, in the same way hard science fiction by Hal Clement and avant-horror by Thomas Ligotti are both, broadly, “the fantastic.” Yet, one could not predict that a Hal Clement fan would also groove to the short stories and weird prose poems and fictional essays and tales-as-instructional-guides of Thomas Ligotti simply because both are “fantastical.”

    In the same way one might use “sci-fi” to only mean stories with spaceships in a conversation, Straub used “literary fiction” in one of the paragraphs in his essay to mean contemporary American realism. That he ably made a distinction between the “ice cream” of Roth and Updike on the one hand, and the not-at-all-ice-cream of William Gaddis and Thomas Bernhardt on the other, tells me that Straub knows that there is more to literary fiction than domestic realism and isn’t conflating the two except for momentary comic effect.

  30. You know, it’s funny, as I was reading this, and the comments that have followed, I was thinking of something entirely else, Freud’s theory of heterosexual development. Freud posits homosexuality (and all the other sexual “deviancies”) as forms of developmental ‘non-realisation’ – stuck in the prior stages – whilst heterosexual development winds up as the culmination of said development, enclosing all those prior stages within it. Two things, first off: I’m seriously truncating the actual inner complexity of Freud’s own ideas about “deviancies” (my account, as it is, is more to do with ‘Freudianism’ than Freud proper) and I’m also not intending to make some point by point comparison between sexuality and the novel. However, as the comparison makes clear, that privilege of heterosexuality as that which encloses the deviancies as immature phase of itself, non-realisations, is something I wish to work with in this different context. What strikes me as resonant here is the notion that literary fiction is writing in its fullest developmental phase, with ‘genre’ relegated to that which is stuck in the prior stages. This is partially why I’ve always found the praises that certain writers, like Hammett or Ligotti, get in which they ‘transcend’ the genre is, at the very least, gentrifying. I do think Lincoln makes a quite excellent point when he argues that the sub-genres of literary fiction do not fit together but I think I’d argue that this is quite the same state of affairs with genre itself. Ryan has made the point already really fantastically above, so I’m going to cite him:

    “Look at it this way, how is Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man a science fiction novel? Well, you might say, it has time travel in it. But, so does Slaughterhouse-5. As well as The Time Traveler’s Wife. Are the last two science-fiction? Some people say yes, some people say no. But if I go to a bookstore, where am I going to find them? Time travel is a trope most associated with science fiction. But it does not define the genre. While science-fiction might have spaceships, ray guns, and aliens, etc., these things no more define the genre than a private eye and femme fatale define film noir. I mean, where’s the private eye in Sunset Blvd.? Where’s the femme fatale in The Night of the Hunter?”

    Exactly. The supposedly syntactical ‘elements’ that compose a genre’s discreteness break down upon any close inspection. However, what I suspect is that what the literary withholds from genre is precisely ‘artistry’ and I don’t think the distinction between pulp and genre quite resolves this, only repackages the bogus distinction. The art claim for literary fiction, for one thing, imports some concept of a maturity in writing. But genre reacts to the word quite distinctly, though no less maturely, from what we call literary fiction. Genre uses language with immense dexterity, I believe, but not so much in a sort of ‘well wrought urn’ mode. Rather, its brilliance is in its mobilisation of language movement and in the creation through arrangements of scenarios, a syntax of them, powerful styles. If, despite the acres of difference between them, such that there’s much passionate antipathy between adherents of each writer, there does seem a greater kinship between Hammett and Chandler than O’Connor and Borges, then I’d argue that this is due not to literary fiction’s greater diversity but is due (along with the misimpressions of marketing, another great point Ryan makes) to the commitment we still have, despite the apparent obliteration of high and low cultures under postmoderism, to relegating the un-urnlike to less than literary rather than what is truer to say of it: that it is anti-literary, another vector altogether. Which is why many of those cross-over books that are deemed literary actually often avoid what’s most profound about them: namely, how they fuck with the literary. Indeed, literary fiction may be able to offer a string of names to show its vast differences but despite everyone from Borges to Kafka to O’Connor to Sorrentino to Barthelme to Bolano to Bernhard do belong together, as their list-ability demonstrates, in terms of the argument that their linguistic acts are the apotheosis of writing. Of course, this is not to say that the language text itself is somehow normative but I do believe our response to the language text as the deepest layer of the literary is definitely normative, not least in terms of the inspirations which inform those texts attentions to style and structure (Alain Robbe-Grillet was deeply influenced by Hammett, for instance, and he veritably invented the notion of the ‘new novel’). Also, too, genre writing can be quite languagey itself. Take, for instance, this passage from King’s latest, Under the Dome, where a light aircraft runs into the ‘dome’ which inexplicably appears out of nowhere:

    “The Seneca exploded over Route 119 and rained fire down on the countryside. It also rained body parts. A smoking forearm – Claudette’s – landed with a thump beside the neatly divided woodchuck.
    It was October twenty-first.”

    What’s quite wonderful about this in terms of the way it’s written is the quite conscious corruption of its own metaphor: where fire raining has a distinct dramatic unity, this is crudened immediately by the rain being turned into a rain of body parts, which in its lumpy thingness is likened to the grotesquery of the ‘neatly divided’ woodchuck, which could double here as a metaphor for the writing of genre itself, cleanly sliced critter. Capped with the disquietingly aerating, the inexpressive yet watchful eye of the date. This is what ‘genre’ does quite constantly on the level of language, corrupts the liquidity of writing, lumps, stirs, jumps, cuts, designs cleanly sliced critter, to achieve all kinds of uncanny effects. Given all this, I really think that there is a deep sense in which we need to do away with the developmental supremacy we hand automatically to literary fiction, even when we say genre works ‘can’ be ‘as’ good as that fiction. It really binds in not just genre but also the sources and pursuits of writing itself.

  31. As a horror writer myself, I have also often heard the phrase, “You’re such a good writer — why do you waste your time with horror?” As if the genre (which is defined, as Straub points out, by emotional viewpoint, not by specific content) is inherently invalid.

    I think “literary fiction” is a genre, at least as bookstores treat it.

    Of course, one could easily say that many well-respected “literary” works are horror. Take Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for example. If the overwhelming emotion of that novel isn’t horror, then I must not understand what horror is. (Beloved even has a strong supernatural element to it, moving it even further into that genre category, if I dare say so.)

    I believe that writers with integrity tell the stories that interest and move them. Its the marketing side of things that insists on labels and pigeonholing, which then gives some people the opportunity to dismiss whole “categories” of work on the basis of arbitrarily defined “genres.”

  32. Book marketing is like a fashion show, everything on parade is stuffed into a size two, even if it requires starvation. We all know real people, real writers, are rounder than that, no matter which peg you cram them into, there will always be that overflow poking out of the top. You can’t use old rusty pipes to lasso a piece of art; you have to use something flexible. There is nothing flexible about labels. Quite frankly the word genre and straight-jacket have a lot in common, in my humble opinion. Meh, what do I know, I’m a no name poet.

  33. I’d say Straub is wrong that Chandler was the last person to elevate genre crime fiction to an art. James Ellroy has done that several times in his still-ongoing career, starting with LA Confidential, and continuing through stylist experiments like White Jazz to his latest, Blood’s a Rover. But crime fiction does have some restraints that most writers haven’t been able to overcome — if they even want to try.

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  39. Good for you, Peter Straub. I made pretty much the same argument in an article for PopMatters (“Airplane Books, Junk Literature, and the Western Canon: All Novels Are Lies, Some Lies Are Better”). With very few exceptions, I find contemporary literary fiction intolerably self-absorbed, gimmicky, and just plain unreadable. Give me horror or sci-fi any day of the week. And I’m so glad Straub talks about Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye”, one of the greatest American novels ever written.

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● ●
Essays

My Body Is Mine

Essays
March 23, 2017 | 1 book mentioned 10 min read
1. It was 2010, six months after returning to Portland, Ore., from a stint of working as a stripper on the Pacific island of Guam. My car radio was tuned to NPR on my drive home from a boring office job. “This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross,” the familiar voice sounded from the speakers quietly as I turned out of the parking lot. I listened passively, as I always did, while stuck in traffic at this time of day. My apartment was only a two-minute drive -- extended to 10 minutes in traffic. “I've always wondered who responds to ads like this one,” Terri Gross continued, “which was in the back of the Village Voice: Attractive, young woman wanted for nurse role-play and domination. No experience necessary, good money, no sex. Well, my guest actually answered that ad and spent four years as a professional dominatrix in midtown Manhattan. And now, she's written a memoir about it called Whip Smart.” I turned up the radio and wished for the traffic to worsen, to be stuck in my beat up silver Kia for the duration of the interview. I wanted to know everything, but not just because the guest had been a dominatrix, but because she wrote about it. I couldn’t imagine writing about my experience as a stripper, but especially my experience working in Guam, despite the fact that my plan was to major in creative writing. I’d write about lots of things, I’d thought. Just not that. I wanted to know about the kind of person that would write about it and then go on NPR. Then Terri Gross said, “It may be the first dominatrix memoir that mentions growing up listening to NPR.” The author was Melissa Febos. I was hooked. I got home even faster than I anticipated. I sat in my car, turned off the windshield wipers and watched the rain pitter-patter before me. I listened for the next half hour, without moving, close to crying but not exactly sure why. At the close of the interview Gross questioned Febos about whether her academic and career prospects might be damaged by her publishing Whip Smart. Not only had she been a dominatrix, but she was also a recovering heroin addict. I leaned into the radio, my own potential future breathing down my neck -- I’d long been terrified that my five year career as a stripper might hold me back. It was the primary reason I felt I couldn’t write about it. “I have no idea if they're going to interfere, but there's nothing I can do about that. I'm sure that there are certain universities that would object to hiring me because of those experiences, but that doesn’t affect my view of their value,” Febos answered. As I had so many other times in my life, I wished I could be that bold. During the interview, I learned that Febos attended The New School -- a university I’d never heard of before. It was located in the West Village, not far from NYU. As soon as the interview ended I did two things: purchased Whip Smart and Googled The New School. I realized immediately that it was the university for me. Ten months later I started my studies there as my family scoffed that I’d never be able to survive in New York. I read Whip Smart in a single night. Febos wrote about sex work in a way I’d never read before. That in the beginning everything about it makes one feel powerful, but how that feeling erodes with time, never fading completely away. But eventually there is acceptance that there are disempowering as well as empowering aspects to the work. I read the memoir Strip City, too, in which Lily Burana defines this for exotic dancers as “stripper damage.” I love that characterization, but it still feels a little too simple, too boiled down. As the years go on, more than anything, dancing settles into a routine -- just like any other job. It loses the intrigue, mystery, the newness and glittering of the taboo. Things that were once novel or shocking become dull and meaningless. There is a getting-through-the-day that takes over. Febos writes: When people asked me how the work affected me, my line was: “I don’t know yet; ask me in ten years.” When I thought about how long I would do it for, I assumed that there would come a day when I simply couldn’t anymore, when everything about it had become banal and sad and I was done. I felt similarly about dancing, and yet the times I tried to force an ending didn’t work. I couldn’t find a straight job or a straight job didn’t pay enough or I’d have a good straight job for a few months and then get laid off because of the economy. At the time I heard Melissa Febos’s interview I’d claimed I’d retired. I had two part-time office jobs, a full time school schedule, but still picked up shifts at the club I’d grown to consider my “home club” in Portland. I needed to save for my move to New York City. But it was an extreme way to live. Sometimes I was up for 48-hours at a time in order to manage it all. I kept stripping a secret at the time. It seemed necessary after living in Guam. I had discovered upon my return that everyone that loved me had been worried. I didn’t talk about it much. I was accused of doing things I hadn’t (mainly prostitution). No one knew exactly why I went nor would they listen nor was I fully willing to be honest anyway. When I started to dance again I insisted silently to myself it was just about the money, but the moment I stepped back in the club, the moment I slithered into my favorite piece of sheer pink lingerie, brushed black mascara onto my eyelashes, and slipped into my eight-inch platform shoes, I felt relieved. I felt home. I was addicted. Febos, too, felt addicted to sex work. In some ways it was worse then her heroin habit because she couldn’t kick it, like she did the drugs. Febos turned to her sober roommates looking for advice when she wanted quit sex work, but wasn’t able to: …when I went to my roommate and expressed my reluctance, she looked at me in disbelief. “Yeah he sounds really annoying. But fifteen hundred dollars? Come on. I would do it if I could.” What she meant was if she had the opportunity. At this point, I was starting to know better...I could not imagine my roommate going through what I knew a session entailed. For fifteen hundred dollars. For an hour’s work. It sounded amazing, when you don’t know what the work meant, or when you pretended not to. In Whip Smart, it starts to feel like she loathes the dungeon and judges everyone around her for participating in it -- even though she, herself, is part of that world. I often made fun of the desires of my strip club regulars, not considering the fact that I was participating in exactly what they wanted of me. During one session, Febos suddenly feels that she and her client were brought together by some unknowable force. That there must be something more to her being in those rooms with men hoping for humiliation and her pleasure in doling it out: Who was this man? What did we have in common to have both ended up in this room? I teetered over his face, peering into it for a dizzy moment. In what direction had this man come from, and where was he going? It was a feeling too objective to be compassion, but I suddenly felt on equal footing with him. For a moment, we formed two halves of a perfectly balanced scale. And then I looked down at his erection and realized that the feeling was probably not mutual. Years after the publication of Whip Smart, Febos published an essay in the "Sex, Again" issue of Tin House titled “My Melissa.” In it she explores the ways her lovers rejected her identity as a person who worked as a dominatrix: After he read the memoir I’d written, he said, I think of her as a different person. Not my Melissa. He preferred me shy. So I distanced myself from the woman I’d written about. …He drew a line between the body I wrote about and the one he loved. This is common. One man I dated found what I had done in my past disgusting. When money was particularly tight I told him I was considering going back, and he said he’d leave me and then refused to talk to me for the rest of the day. I wasn’t that girl anymore, he asserted. I was someone else. But I was. I was always the girl that stripped and so much more. Febos ends her essay: There are not two of me. I am not four times removed from myself. There is Melissa. The one who still dims the lights before she undresses. The one who once put her foot inside a man’s asshole. The one who wrote that book, and the next one. The one who prefers making love to bodies that look like her own. Who was never allowed to love her own body. What I mean is, the next lover who tells me it wasn’t me won’t be a lover I’ll keep. And if you want to know how it felt to spank someone, I will tell you how it feels to be asked such a question. 2. “Kettle Holes,” another essay, was published in Granta six months before the release of Febos’s new collection of essays Abandon Me. “Kettle Holes” explores her attraction to the dungeon. The foundation, she discovered, was in her formative adolescent years when a boy she had known spit on her -- later it became a fetish that she acted out in the dungeon. What do you like? the men would ask. Spitting, I’d say. To even utter the word felt like the worst kind of cuss and I trained myself not to flinch or look away or offer a compensatory smile after I said it. In the dungeon’s dim rooms, I unlearned my instinct for apology. Febos found the idea of spitting on someone without consent unthinkable, but for men who wanted it? Who asked for it? It was, in a way, a loophole. As a stripper, I never wanted to hurt the men I danced for, but like Febos, when they asked for torture, I delighted in complying. One man wanted me to smoother him with a pillow for hours, another had me crush his testicles with my eight-inch stiletto heel repeatedly. I glowed after both of these interactions, happier about the fact the interaction had happened, than the hundreds of dollars they’d paid. I insisted I wasn’t angry, that I actually loved men, and here again are parallels: You must work out a lot of anger that way, they suggested. I never felt angry in my sessions, I told them. I often explained that the dominatrix’s most useful tool was a well-developed empathic sense. What I did not acknowledge to any curious stranger, or to myself, was that empathy and anger are not mutually exclusive. After I’d quit dancing, I also came to believe that my attraction to stripping had much to do with my adolescence. I was sexually abused as a child. I developed early and was told many times, starting at the age of 12, that I oozed sex. That I was sex. That sex embodied me. Stripping was a way to control the thing people asserted I was, whether I wanted it or not, and then have the power to control it. I learned how to say no to men as a stripper. Before getting naked in front of groups of strangers, I hadn’t yet realized that my body was mine: In the dungeon, my identity was distilled once again to its objective meaning. And those men, like all the men before them, prescribed my body’s uses. But this time, my job was to deny instead of acquiesce, to say no instead of yes. Maybe this was the best way to learn how to form those sounds in my own mouth. 3. The essays in Abandon Me explore several of Febos’s important personal relationships: with her adopted sea captain father, the love affair with a woman named Amaia, her brother, and meeting her biological father -- a member of the Wampanoag tribe. These pieces culminate in the 173-page title essay, “Abandon Me.” It is within this section that alongside her love affair with the married Amaia, Febos meets her birth father. Each relationship bounces off the other. The relationship with Amaia rips apart while the relationship with her biological father, painfully and slowly, stitches together. The essay opens: “Every story begins with an unraveling. This story starts with a kiss. Her mouth the soft nail on which my life snagged, and tore open.” I devoured these pages. Curled up on my coral-colored couch, I sometimes looked up as if someone might catch me in the act of crawling into her mind and living there for a while. It felt like I was being folded into her prose. Six months before I started reading Abandon Me, I’d learned who my father was, and that he had passed away seven years prior. Even with the theme of abandonment so clear, I wasn’t expecting to find something so specifically relatable. I expected that of Whip Smart. Of "My Melissa." Of "Kettle Holes." And many of the elements leading up to the title essay I had grabbed onto, lived within, but here was where Febos tore me open and never let me go. Abandon Me doesn’t have graphic, shocking scenes like Febos’s first, instead she goes further into the messy vulnerable, human parts of herself. In “All of Me” Febos writes of her propensity for secrets, she created a “secret world in drugs and desire.” She didn’t acknowledge her desire to be seen, but wrote and published Whip Smart anyway: “a story full of things I’d never spoken aloud to anyone.” She comes to terms with the fact she’d always wanted to be seen. “It’s a violent way to emerge, to tell a secret,” she goes on. Right now, I’m grappling with the possibility of exposing my own secrets. Seven years after I heard Febos’s NPR interview, I’m in the middle of revisions on my memoir about working as a stripper on the island of Guam. I wonder if I can muster the courage to put it into the world, still unsure that what I want is to be seen. But, I’m comforted that Febos found the courage to do so. It makes me feel understood. And in a small way, I’m emboldened by it.
Essays
| 1 book mentioned 10 min read
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Essays

The Writing on the Museum Wall: When Artists Channel Writers

Essays
January 2, 2014 | 1 book mentioned 3 11 min read
"Trouble" (1989) by Christopher Wool, courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum. 1. We tend to think of words as the exclusive raw material of writers. But this has been a season of sparkling reminders that artists from many camps -- cubism, conceptualism, minimalism, realism and pop -- have used words to fashion some of the most inspired art of the past century. The most loudly trumpeted of these reminders is the Christopher Wool retrospective now at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In the very first room at the bottom of the rotunda, you run smack into Wool's mission statement. Stenciled letters are stacked top to bottom on a sheet of white aluminum. As you gaze at the jumble, devoid of spaces or punctuation, words begin to emerge, then sentences, and finally a message. It reads, "The show is over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and go home. They turn around. No more coats and no more home." The show's over? But it just began! Welcome to Wool's world, a place that offers doubt instead of certainty, a world full of disappointment and misfits and unease. A note on the wall beside "The Show Is Over" tells us that the words are from a 1918 essay by the philosopher Vasily Rozanov, allegorizing the upheaval of the Russian Revolution. The Situationist writer Raoul Vaneigem later promoted their sentiment as the ideal description of nihilism. This layering of meanings is reflected in the painting itself, a palimpsest, with painted-over letters visible behind the foreground letters. Something you don't appreciate from a reproduction is just how painterly the picture is, how rigorously the surface is worked, how the hard edges of the letters actually wobble and the white background paint sometimes bleeds onto them. It's ravishing, visually and intellectually, a deft dovetailing of medium and message. Wool started making word paintings in the 1980s, his response to talk that painting had run its course and reached a dead end (just as people periodically pronounce the novel dead). Some of his word paintings are verbose, others are terse. A typically disconcerting bit of shorthand is called "Trouble," just the word's four consonants stacked two on top of two. Another four-letter work is "Blue Fool," the indigo F and O atop the O and L. It feels like Wool is sneering at people who come to museums, but a note assures us that the painting is a "melancholy self-portrait." It's a small consolation; the unease has already set in. A series of nine-letter words, arranged in three triple-letter stacks, list the unsavory characters who populate Wool's world: insomniac, chameleon, anarchist, terrorist, paranoiac, informant, psychotic, celebrity. (The show also includes non-verbal paintings and many grainy photocopies of grim street scenes photographed at night.) "Untitled" (2000) by Christopher Wool, courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum. Finally, at the top of the rotunda, is the painting that ties it all together. It reads, THE HARDER YOU LOOK THE HARDER YOU LOOK. It makes plain that Wool refuses to offer tidy satisfactions. Or does he? Again you see the ghosts of painted-over letters behind the foreground words, and you learn that originally the painting read THE HARDER YOU LOOK THE HARDER IT LOOKS BACK. The sentiment is from the Austrian writer Karl Kraus, who wrote, "The closer you look at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back." Wool apparently agreed with Kraus, then changed his mind and chose to disagree. Rarely have doubt and disagreeableness been so lovely and so rewarding. In "Come Together: Surviving Sandy," a sprawling group show at Industry City in Brooklyn, Deborah Kass exhibited a neon word sculpture called "After Louise Bourgeois." It consists of a vortex of shrinking letters that seem to swirl down a drain as they explain what the fearless Bourgeois means to Kass and many other artists: "A WOMAN HAS NO PLACE IN THE ART WORLD UNLESS SHE PROVES OVER AND OVER AGAIN SHE WON'T BE ELIMINATED." Liam Gillick Detail, Övningskörning (Driving Practice Parts 1 - 30), 2004 Powder-coated aluminium 30 elements, each approximately 96 x 12 x .5” / 243.8 x 30.5 x 1.3cm Photo: Jean Vong Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York. While Kass's message is revealed through the downward spiral of her words, the sculptor Liam Gillick goes in the opposite direction: his words take flight. In a show at the Casey Kaplan gallery in Chelsea, Gillick cut words from aluminum, painted them black, and suspended them from the ceiling. The narrative unspools as you follow these floating sentence fragments deeper into the white-walled gallery, and you realize you're reading the story of autoworkers cut adrift when a Volvo factory in Sweden, founded on immaculate socialist principles, gets sold and shut down. Here's a piece of the complete text: the methods of production were intended to alleviate what had been identified as the most destructive aspects of life on the traditional production line the subsequent take-over of the company and closure leaves nearly all of the former employees out of work especially the older ones it was a relatively progressive company they have generous severance payments and some time to consider what to do next as their money runs out they get increasingly anxious and increasingly alienated from the dynamic of the society This is a story about the human cost of capitalism's brute efficiency. As someone who grew up in Detroit and watched the relentless shuttering of auto plants send the city into its current state of financial and physical ruin, I think I can say that Gillick's message is an important one for our times. It's also quietly beautiful. And quiet beauty is hard to come by nowadays in Chelsea's big-box, high-dollar galleries. Scott Reeder Untitled (Pasta Painting) (detail) 2013 Oil and enamel on canvas 96 x 108 inches Courtesy of the artist; Kavi Gupta, Berlin & Chicago; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Lisa Cooley, New York Even quieter is a series of word paintings by Scott Reeder at the Lisa Cooley gallery on the Lower East Side. Ranked along one wall, his bright paintings pair two four-letter words, one atop the other, to give us this Detroit-based artist's view of a world full of fakery, menace, and light fun. (He uses pasta to make his pictures.) Some samples: FAKE RICH, IFFY IDOL, MOOT MEME, JUST INFO, COPS KISS. On the gallery's back wall is a large painting (96 by 108 inches) that appears to be a starry sky at night. As you step closer, though, you realize the stars are actually tiny white letters and numerals. It's a bewitching expression of the infinite possibilities of language. The use of words in art is nothing new, of course. A century ago cubists such as Picasso and Braque inserted snippets of newspaper advertisements into their fragmented compositions. Magritte combined images and words in his famous 1928 painting of a pipe with the message This is not a pipe.  More recently, Barbara Kruger followed his lead in works that combine photographs with wry verbal messages, such as her picture of a hand pressing the point of a safety pin to a fingertip on another person's hand, overlaid by the words Thinking of You. Jenny Holzer, Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner, John Baldessari, Jasper Johns, and many other artists have used words, even whole alphabets, in their work. Ed Ruscha has made paintings out of isolated monosyllabic words, including "Oof," "Honk," "Boss," "Noise," and "Smash," as well as the Hollywood sign and corporate logos. Ruscha once said, "I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again." With Ruscha's one-word paintings, there's no need to look harder. One look says it all, which is part of the visceral fun. 2. What these very different artists have in common, I think, is a hunger for that most writerly of staples, narrative. Curiously, it was not a word artist who made me aware of this hunger. It was the rigorous realist Rackstraw Downes, a 74-year old Englishman, recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, a painter of meticulous rural landscapes and urban scenes that spring from an enormous ambition. Downes has spent his long career trying not merely to capture the world as we see it, but the world as it is. He has said," I want to paint exactly the way something is" -- as opposed to the edited version after our brain has processed what comes through our eyes. And so his horizons slope, his bridges curve, his power lines wiggle, his skyscrapers tilt. He eschews conventional subject matter in favor of more prosaic, but narratively more potent, subjects, including lumber yards, oil fields, housing projects, scrap heaps, the underbellies of bridges. He paints onsite, without the aid of photographs, working for months to render a scene exactly the way it is. The paintings are visually stunning and they accomplish in one stroke what all realists strive for: They make us feel that we are truly seeing the world for the first time by elevating, in Downes's formulation, "the art of being intensely, thoroughly observant." I began to become aware of the depth Downes's artistry -- and its reliance on narrative -- after seeing a retrospective of his work and then reading his rewarding little book of essays, In Relation to the Whole. (Downes studied literary criticism before taking up painting, and he is as insightful on the writing of Stendhal, Chekhov, and Maupassant as he is on the art of Brueghel, Charles Burchfield, and Manet.) Two artists whose use of narrative strongly influenced Downes are Breughel, who x-rayed man's monumental hubris in his tiny painting "Tower of Babel," and Burchfield, a painter of ecstatic natural worlds. Burchfield, Downes wrote, "combined the vision of the romantic poet with that of the naturalist. It is a vision that reads nature, for whom a wildflower is not a spot of color but a sign, revealing nature's processes...Following Burchfield, I tried to see the landscape as including legible stories as well as combinations of forms or qualities of light." I asked Downs about the importance of storytelling in his work. "It's very important to me," he said, "and I think it is to everybody's landscape painting. I think it's a shame to think of landscape painting as some sort of abstractness. It's not. It often does tell a story. I seek out those stories I'm intrigued by." One such story is told in a spectacular 1990 painting called "In the High Oil Field, February, After the Passage of a Cold Front." (Like another of his heroes, John Constable, Downes is obsessed with making his pictures meteorogically accurate, and his wordy titles often include a picture's exact location, point of view, time of day, weather conditions, and other pertinent data. For comparison, see Constable's "Hadleigh Castle, Mouth of the Thames -- Morning After a Stormy Night.") "High Island Oil Field" is 10 feet long and just 16 inches tall, a favored Downes format, and at first glance it's a humdrum scene -- a vast platter of Texas scrub punctuated by some wheezing oil rigs, a trench of reddish water, a distant, slope-shouldered horizon under an empty blue sky. But, with apologies to Christopher Wool and Karl Kraus, the harder you look the harder it looks back and the more you see. Downes, a descendant of Breughel, is ever alert to the ways man's hubris alters the natural world. Here is his description of the picture's narrative: It represented for me an accommodation, a sort of peaceable kingdom. The pumps are on raised platforms because this land, which is at sea level, floods during a hurricane. Cows, horses and wading birds share this 1,200-acre field with the pumps, and when strong winds blow in from the north after the passage of a cold front, the sediments that are pumped up with the oil and natural gas and which collect in the bottoms of ditches, are stirred up so the ditch water looks red. The perspective down the center of this painting is the raised embankment of an old railroad bed. The cows like to congregate and lie down to rest on this long-infertile ground because it dries off quickly after a rain; and so they dung it up intensively too. So, it is gradually beginning to regain fertility and support a sparse cover of weeds which spread in by runners from either side of the embankment. Here the tenses of a landscape imagery which represents what is lost or threatened are reversed: we see decaying industrialization being replaced or reclaimed by the progress of nature. Those weeds interest me more than ancient redwoods; they are the vanguard of nature's forces as she wages her war back on us; perhaps I should say, here nature re-embraces us, her prodigal sons and daughters. These weeds give the idea of nature not as a state we've lost but as a process with a future. In Downes's skilled hands, a scruffy Texas oil field reveals a narrative equal to Breughel's "Tower of Babel," which Downes sees as "a symbol of hubris, of man too big for his boots." Another artist who told stories with paint was Norman Rockwell. Once dismissed as a purveyor of kitschy Americana, a lowly illustrator, Rockwell's reputation as a major artist is now surging. There's a retrospective of his career at the Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville. Rockwell's famous painting, "Saying Grace," just fetched a staggering $46 million at auction. (He was paid $3,500 for it in 1951 by The Saturday Evening Post.) And he's the subject of an insightful new 500-page biography by Deborah Solomon, American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell. The book reminds us that Rockwell's diverse fan base has included Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, and Steven Spielberg, and it makes the case that Rockwell, like Downes and the makers of word art, was driven by a need to tell stories. Here's how Solomon describes Rockwell's method: Proust had his madeleine and Rockwell had his lamppost. He saw it clearly before him, a lamppost on a quiet street. Then he imagined what could happen to it. A boy climbs up it, a boy falls off it; someone chases the boy around it. He did this all the time, envisioning the lamppost and waiting for the scene to emerge, a boy or two, a certain facial expression, a story. Pieter Breughel's "Peasant Dance" hung over Rockell's mantel. "The story," Rockwell said, "is the first thing and the last thing." Robert Indiana (b. 1928), EAT/DIE, 1962. Oil on canvas, 2 panels, 72 × 60 in. (182.9 × 152.4 cm) each. Private Collection. ©2013 Morgan Art Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 3. The wordiest of all the current shows is "Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE," now at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This career retrospective, as its title implies, sets out to make the case that Indiana's body of work is richer and far more diverse than his best known and most iconic image, the two- and three-dimensional renderings of the word LOVE, with its L and skewed O stacked on top of its V and E, all the letters tightly interlocked, multi-hued, ever-changing, simple and yet endlessly complex, which is to say Indiana has made the physical word into something much like the emotion itself. The show is a knockout. We see Indiana grappling with that woolly beast, The American Dream, restlessly probing its promise, glitter and horror. The result is a coast-to-coast gabfest, a cacophony of words, including the names of "American Sweethearts" (May, Lil, Ida, Flo, Ivy, Eva), place names (Chicago, Indiana, the deep South), signage ("Bar," "South Ferry," "The American Gas Works") and political slogans ("Just as in the anatomy of man every nation must have its hind part"). It's easy to believe Indiana's claim that he was influenced by the writings of Melville, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams. I'm guessing he's a Kerouac man too. For me, the most intriguing piece in the show is "EAT/DIE," specifically the iteration of those words in large block letters on discs inside two squares, EAT in sunny orange, DIE funereal black. One critic likened this pair of words to "signs for a greasy-spoon diner in an existential film noir." But I think that reading is reductive and beside the point. For me, "EAT/DIE" is nothing less than shorthand for the futility and pointlessness of human striving. We spend years eating (and making art and writing essays and building skyscrapers) and then we die. And that, as they say, is that. It doesn't mean anything and you can sum it up in two three-letter words. Indiana's act of compression is every bit as powerful and unsettling as Wool's "TRBL." But of course it's your call. You may read "EAT/DIE" as something altogether different, neither as signs for an existential greasy spoon nor as clever shorthand for the futility and absence of meaning in human life. That's the maddening magic of words, and that's why artists continue to be drawn to them: words are slippery, they refuse to be fixed, they tell stories that are open to infinite readings. And so they will always keep us coming back to art and to literature for more.
Essays
| 1 book mentioned 3 11 min read