http://alecniedenthal.blogspot.com
Alec Niedenthal's fiction appears or is forthcoming in Smokelong Quarterly, Agriculture Reader, Sleepingfish, PANK, Corium, and other places. He currently lives in Sarasota, Florida, where mostly it is hot.
Throughout the nineties and for the first half of the past decade, there were two dominant strains of sitcom: the blue-collar/white-collar family sitcom (Roseanne, Everybody Loves Raymond, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Frasier, etc.), and the five-or-so-friends-hanging-out-in-a-city sitcom (Seinfeld, Friends, Cheers, etc.). The former culminated and withered with the end of Everybody Loves Raymond–now most often reiterated ironically by The Simpsons (which was far ahead of its time in that respect) and Family Guy–while the latter still persists in a way, only disguised or retooled as the workplace sitcom (30 Rock, The Office, Parks and Recreation, Party Down), a formula which began in part with Murphy Brown and, in its current mode, with Scrubs and the British Office.
I’m almost finished reading Light in August. It’s my first Faulkner. Starting at roughly the halfway point it grew into one of the most complex novels I’ve ever read; I’d like to write a fattish pamphlet on this book someday. But what I’d like to focus on here, in broad strokes, is a question regarding “how” rather than “what,” of logic and not of contradiction–specifically how Faulkner produces flat characters, that is, flat characters with depth.
Until the halfway point I mentioned earlier, I thought that Faulkner’s characters were, if not simple, then unsurprising–I expected, perhaps, the sort of character who would be presented at first as a racist, and would gradually come to light as nothing like one, as the modest guardian of the victimized race. More or less the character that commercial cinema wants us to believe always lurks within any localization of racist discourse. I eventually realized that many of the characters who seemed to me predictable were flat, pure surface depth: characters who function as signs, specific voices with almost automated responses–like binary switches–that present and order their social, political, or economic genealogies. Flat characters can be instruments of social critique, as in a Brechtian drama, or of comedy–a character who can simply be positioned and repositioned, his or her function made iterable and reiterated.
The newly translated collection of Thomas Bernhard’s prose, aptly titled Prose (Seagull Books – August 15), should be anticipated as a major literary event (or at least as a book to celebrate). Whenever readers of the future want to recommend a Bernhard to start with, I hope that it will be this one. It’s possibly the most deranged, compact and dangerous performance I’ve seen Bernhard give, a performance somehow polyphonic within Bernhard’s singular voice that’s always, to often brutal and hilarious effect, dashing behind itself only to expose its weaknesses again and again. Here Bernhard is a tightrope-walker like no other. And, of course, the translation is gorgeous. More soon.
Friends, I am editing the upcoming month of Everyday Genius. The upcoming month is June. It’s going to be so hot, then. What the hell are we going to do? Anyway, please email me any submissions that you are submitting–gifts, I want gifts!–to my email, whatever that is. It’s alecniedenthal@gmail.com. Please email me viruses and sign me up for newsletters, too. All is a mess.
The NOON reading is tonight at 7Pm. Readers include: Kim Chinquee, Sara Jaffe, Tao Lin, Lincoln Michel (yay Lincoln!), Dylan Nice, Diane Williams, Anya Yurchyshyn. It’s at the Center for Fiction (17 E. 47th Street), and if you are going, please RSVP to 212.755.6710. This is the reading-equivalent of Lollapalooza or at least Pitchfork Fest. Looks like there will be free wine and chairs.
Also, if you are in Florida, next Friday Justin Taylor, Amy McDaniel, Alexis Orgera and I are reading here in Sarasota. On Saturday, we’re doing a panel on “reading style.” There’s a Facebook event.
There is a split in experimental fiction, it would seem, which is hardly a split: a duality which is hardly dual. Articulating it, in addition, will not add to or subtract from what I’m provisionally calling “experimental fiction.” I am not going out of my way to break open or unmask a binary which has, till now, subsisted in relative silence. The following is a brief and incomplete diagnosis–neither positive nor negative, or else both at once. Most importantly, perhaps, these are not two distinct regimes (again, a split which is hardly, or is not, a split). Nor should this be taken as a statement of fact, but as a condition which I’ve begun, more and more, to see in what I read.
Comedian Eugene Mirman has been added to the already-sweet lineup of tonight’s Rumpus/Flavorpill/Tin House event. He’ll be joining Colson Whitehead, Sam Lipsyte, Lorelei Lee, Michael Showalter, and others. I’m probably a little late in posting this, but if you’re in NYC right now and, like, somewhere near W 16th street, you should be at this event right now. You know who you are, and you should be there.
“The M.F.A. is a degree in servitude.” Mr. Cohen said. “It is a way to keep writing safe–to keep reading safe from writing. That I would be criticized as being romantic, or impractical, for making that statement just goes to show everything that’s wrong. Writing is a conviction before it is a craft.” — Joshua Cohen, in an interview (and profile on his forthcoming Witz) with the Observer here.
I’m not sure what to think about this (NSFW) sort of disturbing account of a recent SXSM performance. A very unsettling phenomenon, to be sure. I have no interest in this guy–I had no idea who he was before I stumbled upon this write-up–but how do you react to this very, uh, performative performance? What is your visceral reaction?
What’s the difference between this type of performance (GG Allin we could place under this “criminal transgressor” rubric), and the same performativity in, to be timely–and because for both of these types the music itself is only a stage for the performance–someone like Lady Gaga’s project? I mean, assuming Lady Gaga is a “cultural transgressor,” what is the differing mechanism, if there is one, in Fat Mike’s performance? Or are neither legitimately transgressive? Blah blah. Just thought this was an interesting thing.
Story by James Franco up over at Esquire. I can’t say it’s great–if it weren’t by James Franco, this 100% would not be in Esquire–but I can’t say it’s bad, either. Seems like a pretty typical “MFA story,” if that’s even a type of story.
Mega-congratulations to our own Roxane Gay on Ayiti, a collection of stories and poems about Haiti, which the folks over at Artistically Declined Press announced today they’ll be publishing this fall. Congrats also to Jereme Dean, HTMLG personality, whose collection of poems Of Many Departures has found a home with the same!
In light of yesterday’s “shittalking”: has Tao Lin been cannibalized by “Tao Lin”? Has he fictionalized the commonplace–in the shape of both blog and book–to such an extent that “Tao Lin” the artist has appropriated and swallowed Tao Lin the person? that “Tao Lin” has substituted art with life, or has blended the two? Will his fictions from now on only take place as extensions of the fiction, the theater piece, which he has signed “Tao”? Which Tao Lin is realer: the one who blogs, or the one “out there”? Or does any difference between the two Taos remain?
Or are these simply the demands, more or less, of writing what we might call “a singular vision” in 2010? Are there alternate paths with different demands–is such a path desirable?
Is “Tao Lin” the most quiet transgressor? Or is his style just another wave of the “meta” bullshit that’s been around forever? (I don’t think that’s true, but…)
I’m not “shittalking.” Just talking.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ95z6ywcBY&feature=player_embedded
Uh, this is kind of amazing. Pretty lame New York mag write-up here.
“The stage is still raised, but it no longer rises from an unfathomable depth; it has become a dais. The didactic play and the epic theater are attempts to sit down on a dais.” — Walter Benjamin, “What Is Epic Theater?”
Yet we can be astounded. Before what? Before this other possibility: that the frenziedness of technology may entrench itself everywhere to such an extent that someday, throughout everything technological, the essence of technology may come to presence in the coming-to-pass of truth.
Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it.
Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection on art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth after which we are questioning. — Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”
Earlier in this essay, H describes the status of art in Ancient Greece: “They [the arts] brought the presence of the gods, brought the dialogue of divine and human destinings, to radiance … It was a single, manifold revealing.”
It seems that art as such has questioned its essence, and answered: art can be anything whatsoever. But is it time for art to question technology? Not technology in its instrumental sense, but what Heidegger calls “the essence” of technology–technology as a revealing. Is it time for art to put technology on stage? Is that what we’re doing? If this is too cryptic, I apologize. I just wanted an excuse to post what I block-quoted above, which is just a beautiful moment to me.
“Historia in nuce [history in a nutshell]. Friend and Enemy. The friend is he who affirms and confirms me. The enemy is he who challenges me (Nuremberg 1947). Who can challenge me? Basically, only myself. The enemy is he who defines me. That means in concreto: only my brother can challenge me and only my brother can be my enemy.”– Carl Schmitt, while interned by American forces following World War II
My mom just called me to tell me that this interview with the late Barry Hannah is airing on NPR right now. It will also be online at 5 PM ET.
Below are a few eulogies, remembrances, encomia, etc. for the late Barry Hannah. No introduction needed. Thank you, Barry.
Jeremiah Chamberlin (editor at Fiction Writers Review):
I experienced both sides of Barry’s honesty when I was a student of his in 2003 at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. The day of my workshop, we moved around the table in usual fashion–what’s working, what isn’t. Janet Peery was co-teaching the session, and among the group were writers such as Ben Percy, Lisa Lerner, Dave Schuman, Dave Koch, Forrest Anderson, and John Struloeff. I was giddy to be in the room with one of my literary heroes. And while the others were offering feedback on my writing, I stole the occasional glance to see how Barry was reacting. Most of the time he spent flipping fairly idly through my pages. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been a surprise when, upon his turn to speak, he began gutting the opening paragraph of the prologue to the novel I’d been working on. Sentence by sentence, word by word, he worked like a butcher, cutting back the fat. Let’s just say that there wasn’t much meat left when he got down to the bone. Or, rather, he showed me that there hadn’t been much muscle to begin with. Would it be too much to say I felt eviscerated along with my work?
Yet it wasn’t cruel. It was honest. And when the furnace of my face cooled I saw that he was mostly right.
Hey, so this year is the tenth anniversary of The Lioness, a seminal album by countryish indie-rockers Songs: Ohia, whose frontman is the estimable Jason Molina (who also fronts Magnolia Electric Co.). Molina’s best, I think, are elliptical, sinister love songs, with which he stuffed The Lioness from front to back. His songs are heavily symbolic, studded with violent images, etc.–just listen to the songs I’m posting below (but don’t watch the videos–they’re just still images of the band), won’t you?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXsFkRBsAF8
From Walter Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence”:
If the rule of myth is broken occasionally in the present age, the coming age is not so unimaginably remote that an attack on law is altogether futile. But if the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured, this furnishes proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is possible, and shows by what means. Less possible and also less urgent for human kind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has been realized in particular cases. For only mythic violence, not divine, will be recognizable as such with certainty, unless it be in incomparable effects, because the expiatory power of violence is invisible to men. … Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred dispatch, may be called “sovereign” violence.
