June 10th, 2010 / 6:15 pm
Craft Notes
Mike Young
Craft Notes
“She will continue driving down the Feather River Canyon from Portola to sit in front of the plant where Paul died with signs about work place safety as long as she feels the need”
“Friends and family of Paul Smith toasted him with his favorite drink — Coca-Cola — Wednesday at noon and remembered him on Facebook, exactly two years after he died in an accident at work.” — from the Mercury Register
Hi, reader. Writer of things to be read, probably. You, writer/reader, might have read, as I did, that interview between Jonathan Lethem and David Gates where they get anxious about “putting” the internet in their fiction. Or you might have read things about how brand names shouldn’t be “used” in fiction. Now I invite you to read a story about things that people do while they are trying to live, which may or may not help you to untangle these tough philosophical questions.
Tags: conventional realism
Don’t be such an apparatchik. Socialist Realism is a bore. Plus nothing dates as badly as references to consumer products and new technologies. Fiction does not take place in the real, physical world. It takes place in the landscape of the mind.
thank you for your intellectual comment, it was interesting to read and think about
Kim, that’s all nonsense. I’m not sure what you’re talking about.
Thanks for this, Mike.
the landscape of my mind has Diet Orange Crush poured all over it
more so than it ever did a tree
If you don’t know what I’m talking about then how can you be sure it’s nonsense?
Nice juxtaposition Mike. Hostess Sno Balls 4eva.
I’m about the last person who would defend Rick Moody, but the idea (or insinuation) that such conversations or philosophical questions aren’t worth having or asking because there is a lot of really bad shit going on the world is, honestly, completely stupid.
Especially when your insinuation is taking place on a blog about literature, writing, and those very questions.
Not as stupid, perhaps, as writing Rick Moody when I meant Jonathan Lethem.
I think it’s about the pertinence of Coca-Cola as direct object.
Kim I is so much cooler than you.
Using popcult and newtech is lazy shorthand. Make up your own. That’s why it’s called fiction.
ugh, i went looking for ironic quotemarks where there were none. Totally missed the point.
Apologies.
hi topher, i agree with you. my “point” is definitely not that these questions/conversations aren’t worth having, nor merely that “bad shit is going on in the world,” but that such conversations—as in the case of the lethem/gates interview—are often had in vacuums that ignore the adaptations of people not commonly invited into “cultural introspection,” people who nonetheless incorporate technology into their everyday culture, into their ways of living with themselves and with each other.
i believe that starting a facebook group to organize drinking coca-cola outside of the factory where your husband died is a sad and beautiful story. on a story level. and people are doing such things all over, all the time. so gates/lethem—in only being able to talk about “my character without a cell phone” or “my character has a dial-up modem”—are showing, at the very least, a lack of imagination.
i also believe (this might be the craziest and most annoying belief, if you’re keeping score) that “facebook” and “coca cola” are beautiful words. and they will be even more beautiful words when they have long ceased being contemporary cultural references and become more understood via their etymological lineage/word image: “book of faces”? that’s intense.
and until then, the fact that we know what coca-cola bottles look like when there are a lot of coca-cola bottles at once, and we know what we look like when we are facebook, and we can imagine what someone looks like starting this group for their late husband, that they are sitting at their computer doing that, is all just as poignant a narrative image as the one in the title of the post, and which i think is poignant enough that lethem/gates making fun of writing “he clicked send” comes off, to me, as boorish and out-of-touch with the sort of “contemporary emotional landscape” that should be, maybe, their native terrain
unfortunately, i have found that in the course of living inside my mind, i keep meeting these other people, who are very unpredictable, and who do things whether i tell them they should or not, and these people have sadly had lasting effects on my feelings and thoughts, no matter how much i would rather just make everything up
i don’t know the lethem/gates piece so i can’t speak on it but to say that using pop culture or time markers is lazy is lazy. i feel like people avoid it ‘philosophically’ because they want their work to have a timeless quality, but c’mon a) nobody can predict that shit b) write good words and shit will last and c) most of the idiosyncratic work that has lasted has been people pointing to the specifics of their time: kerouac, fitzgerald, joyce, barthelme, salinger, carver, dostoevski, and on and on. plus coca-cola, as mike pointed out, has a way nicer sound than brown fizzy soda drink. carbonated refreshment. popular pop but not pepsi. nope.
Yeah, I like the “beauty” of new/popular/techno language. It is evocative (Of what? Of “something” that we can collectively “know” or “plug into” or “understand”? Of connection?) and “sound-bite-ish” at the same time. Facebook, Myspace, Google, Wiki, blog, chat, tweet. Just to name a few.
I like the popular and contemporary and don’t mind it at all, in fiction or non-fiction. It can be used to great effect in any era.
(Think “doomsday gap” in Dr. Strangelove, for example.)
also, the capacity to avoid dating oneself presumes the writer has intimate knowledge of the future, in which case why is the writer writing about what the writer is writing about and not writing about going back in time, a process that secures first the timelessness of the work;
Don’t be such an apparatchik. Socialist Realism is a bore. Plus nothing dates as badly as references to consumer products and new technologies. Fiction does not take place in the real, physical world. It takes place in the landscape of the mind.
thank you for your intellectual comment, it was interesting to read and think about
Volkswagen + Sports Illustrated + Kraft Cheese + This Is Your Life + Bergdorf Goodman + Harper’s Bazaar + Bennington + All-Bran + Squib Building + Chrysler + Ohio State + Popular Mechanics + Philip Roth = Goodbye, Columbus
Kim, that’s all nonsense. I’m not sure what you’re talking about.
Thanks for this, Mike.
the landscape of my mind has Diet Orange Crush poured all over it
more so than it ever did a tree
i hate that fantasy: that you won’t die and turn to dust because you eschewed fucking pop culture refs.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about then how can you be sure it’s nonsense?
Nice juxtaposition Mike. Hostess Sno Balls 4eva.
I’m about the last person who would defend Rick Moody, but the idea (or insinuation) that such conversations or philosophical questions aren’t worth having or asking because there is a lot of really bad shit going on the world is, honestly, completely stupid.
Especially when your insinuation is taking place on a blog about literature, writing, and those very questions.
Not as stupid, perhaps, as writing Rick Moody when I meant Jonathan Lethem.
I think it’s about the pertinence of Coca-Cola as direct object.
Kim I is so much cooler than you.
Using popcult and newtech is lazy shorthand. Make up your own. That’s why it’s called fiction.
ugh, i went looking for ironic quotemarks where there were none. Totally missed the point.
Apologies.
hi topher, i agree with you. my “point” is definitely not that these questions/conversations aren’t worth having, nor merely that “bad shit is going on in the world,” but that such conversations—as in the case of the lethem/gates interview—are often had in vacuums that ignore the adaptations of people not commonly invited into “cultural introspection,” people who nonetheless incorporate technology into their everyday culture, into their ways of living with themselves and with each other.
i believe that starting a facebook group to organize drinking coca-cola outside of the factory where your husband died is a sad and beautiful story. on a story level. and people are doing such things all over, all the time. so gates/lethem—in only being able to talk about “my character without a cell phone” or “my character has a dial-up modem”—are showing, at the very least, a lack of imagination.
i also believe (this might be the craziest and most annoying belief, if you’re keeping score) that “facebook” and “coca cola” are beautiful words. and they will be even more beautiful words when they have long ceased being contemporary cultural references and become more understood via their etymological lineage/word image: “book of faces”? that’s intense.
and until then, the fact that we know what coca-cola bottles look like when there are a lot of coca-cola bottles at once, and we know what we look like when we are facebook, and we can imagine what someone looks like starting this group for their late husband, that they are sitting at their computer doing that, is all just as poignant a narrative image as the one in the title of the post, and which i think is poignant enough that lethem/gates making fun of writing “he clicked send” comes off, to me, as boorish and out-of-touch with the sort of “contemporary emotional landscape” that should be, maybe, their native terrain
unfortunately, i have found that in the course of living inside my mind, i keep meeting these other people, who are very unpredictable, and who do things whether i tell them they should or not, and these people have sadly had lasting effects on my feelings and thoughts, no matter how much i would rather just make everything up
i don’t know the lethem/gates piece so i can’t speak on it but to say that using pop culture or time markers is lazy is lazy. i feel like people avoid it ‘philosophically’ because they want their work to have a timeless quality, but c’mon a) nobody can predict that shit b) write good words and shit will last and c) most of the idiosyncratic work that has lasted has been people pointing to the specifics of their time: kerouac, fitzgerald, joyce, barthelme, salinger, carver, dostoevski, and on and on. plus coca-cola, as mike pointed out, has a way nicer sound than brown fizzy soda drink. carbonated refreshment. popular pop but not pepsi. nope.
Here’s the link. Not sure why you didn’t drop a link in your post…
http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/4930/prmID/1502
You did originally say between Lethem and Moody and that made looking for the conversation rather difficult.
Yeah, I like the “beauty” of new/popular/techno language. It is evocative (Of what? Of “something” that we can collectively “know” or “plug into” or “understand”? Of connection?) and “sound-bite-ish” at the same time. Facebook, Myspace, Google, Wiki, blog, chat, tweet. Just to name a few.
I like the popular and contemporary and don’t mind it at all, in fiction or non-fiction. It can be used to great effect in any era.
(Think “doomsday gap” in Dr. Strangelove, for example.)
thanks for the link.. you’re right that originally i mistakenly wrote rick moody instead of david gates… my apologies..
i guess i didn’t feel like linking the interview because i didn’t care as much about publicizing that interview as i did about the story..
also, the capacity to avoid dating oneself presumes the writer has intimate knowledge of the future, in which case why is the writer writing about what the writer is writing about and not writing about going back in time, a process that secures first the timelessness of the work;
something made me about your post think of a thing i heard/read (here?) recently which is there are two kinds of people: romantics and sentimentalists.
kleenex snow
I like the sounds, too, and don’t mind the references — it’s all about the timing — but we have to acknowledge that it’s a tough call to use or not to use “brand” names, like Facebook.
Case in point, in an early draft of badbadbad, I had this great(to me)-sounding part where this guy goes off “defining” his generation w/ all these “my” statements, and the perfect, logical finale was a reference to MySpace, but by the time I got around to the final (current) draft, it made no sense to reference MySpace anymore b/c Facebook has so usurped MySpace’s cultural role. So now the last line of the rant, in service to the contemporary setting of the novel, had to sacrifice some of its alliterative punch. I’d rather go w/ the better sound, but it made no sense in the context of the scene, and so I had to go with sense.
I think this example shows how clearly tech names, at least, date material. Sometimes made-up names work fine as kinda knowing substitutes, but other times, I think, we need the brand reference, and yet in doing so we enter very time-specific territory, which may or may not be a benefit to our work, no?
life: a cereal, game, what you struggle to maintain, and one day will never have ever again
Volkswagen + Sports Illustrated + Kraft Cheese + This Is Your Life + Bergdorf Goodman + Harper’s Bazaar + Bennington + All-Bran + Squib Building + Chrysler + Ohio State + Popular Mechanics + Philip Roth = Goodbye, Columbus
i hate that fantasy: that you won’t die and turn to dust because you eschewed fucking pop culture refs.
Here’s the link. Not sure why you didn’t drop a link in your post…
http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/4930/prmID/1502
You did originally say between Lethem and Moody and that made looking for the conversation rather difficult.
thanks for the link.. you’re right that originally i mistakenly wrote rick moody instead of david gates… my apologies..
i guess i didn’t feel like linking the interview because i didn’t care as much about publicizing that interview as i did about the story..
something made me about your post think of a thing i heard/read (here?) recently which is there are two kinds of people: romantics and sentimentalists.
kleenex snow
I like the sounds, too, and don’t mind the references — it’s all about the timing — but we have to acknowledge that it’s a tough call to use or not to use “brand” names, like Facebook.
Case in point, in an early draft of badbadbad, I had this great(to me)-sounding part where this guy goes off “defining” his generation w/ all these “my” statements, and the perfect, logical finale was a reference to MySpace, but by the time I got around to the final (current) draft, it made no sense to reference MySpace anymore b/c Facebook has so usurped MySpace’s cultural role. So now the last line of the rant, in service to the contemporary setting of the novel, had to sacrifice some of its alliterative punch. I’d rather go w/ the better sound, but it made no sense in the context of the scene, and so I had to go with sense.
I think this example shows how clearly tech names, at least, date material. Sometimes made-up names work fine as kinda knowing substitutes, but other times, I think, we need the brand reference, and yet in doing so we enter very time-specific territory, which may or may not be a benefit to our work, no?
Thank you for posting this. Seriously. Thank you.
it seems really silly at this point in time to be anxious about including references to the internet in one’s fiction. i also think it’s silly to make up or omit a brand name for fear of including an actual brand name. unless your fiction is science fiction or parallel universe fiction, we live in a world where nearly everyone uses the internet and encounters/interacts with brand names on a daily basis. i can’t think of any convincing argument against.
you want your fiction to be “timeless”? probably just about any “great” novel you can think of has time-specific references; their time period may not have been quite as branded and there was no internet, but it’s the same thing. i would say to a confused individual, “you don’t know what fiction ‘looks like’ or ‘should be like’ in the year 2010, you don’t know what ‘timeless fiction’ is now. that’s because you haven’t created it yet. stop being a worrywart and stop being so precious, and go create however you desire. that will be ‘the right way.'”
care to elaborate?
Funny post, but can we quit it with the unnecessary quote marks? It’s getting obnoxious…
Nice post. Mike Young, I agree: the story is sad and beautiful. Contemporary writers who think they’re elevated above Facebook and coca cola are pretentious and boring to me, like the girl I met in college who “never” watched TV and marvelled at the fact that I did. Meet your readers, folks. They are human beings, members of this society and– GUESS WHAT– so are you. That is nothing to be ashamed of or necessarily hide from in your work.
technology references that date fiction: he got up to change the channel, she looked in the phone book, he paid the man as he pumped the gas, she put in a video tape, the tv was getting bad reception, we looked up Iraq in the encyclopedia.
hi matt: i am not a fan of faddish liberal scare quoting, either, but i wasn’t highlighting “putting” or “used” to be cute or disaffected or ironic or funny or strike a pose or use scare quotes as a high five to commune myself with a certain scene ..
the reason i put those two words in quotes is because i feel skeptical about how casually they sit where they are, and i wanted to call attention to the way they represent the idea that we often talk about the world as something to be used or artificially inserted into these terrific “made up” constructions we masterful storytellers whip up “in our minds,” which is an attitude i sometimes feel skeptical about.. sometimes i feel that such an attitude is like pheidippides sitting around leaving the message undelivered until he thinks of a clever enough way to deliver it.. i don’t always feel this way, and i know that this attitude is probably even more exasperating than excessive “” garnishing—especially in this camp—but i do have sometimes have strong feelings toward an idea of storyteller as agent of social record, especially of those unrecorded or dismissed for whatever reason..
hi melissa, thanks for commenting. i agree with you. tho i’m guessing some clever person might point out that the people in the story linked probably aren’t our readers… which is a whole other discussion, i guess..
he sat on a chair
no probz =)
Seems to me you could leave in the Myspace reference rather than replace it with Facebook if that’s what “sounds” better (alliteratively etc) and is what your character would have said at the time (in the book’s timeline) and if it is what works best for you. If you wanted to.
The time when Myspace was emerging as the ruling social-networking phenom was a very exciting time, imo, because it was a time when people were really changing (expanding) their notions of what it means to communicate, and how. I remember the first time I heard “Grass” by Animal Collective because this chick I thought was cool posted it (thus adding the song to her own personal “brand”) on her Myspace page.
Now imagine an overhead shot of the new millennium timeline, zooming in closer and closer to the exact moment I first heard that song. Sparkle.
what’s “wrong” with dating fiction? doesn’t that build in future nostalgia or gesture at the passing of time? couldn’t those things be seen as “positives”?
he turned on the oven.
this kind of conversation is like authors willingly turning themselves into pathetic dinosaurs. “serious” writers/philosophers in the “olden days” didn’t write in magazines with ads in them, bc those things didn’t exist. then they did exist. then serious writers published there. there didn’t use to be podcasts. now the new yorker has podcasts. now serious writers appear on them. facebook, blogging, all of these things are just another step.
the thing that alienates me from writers who talk/think in the general manner of this linked conversation is this notion of preserving the myth of the author as a dignified person with well-established boundaries and tastes in their social behavior and the distribution of their writing (if you read old Paris Review interviews, most authors back then didn’t talk like that, so there’s some insidious conservative impulse taking over, apparently).
i don’t want to be an author whose social etiquette resembles that of an academic or a lawyer or banker or something. artists have and always will be many things, but i don’t know how attempting to be proper or worrying about what’s acceptable or what not to do is going to benefit the creation of art by a living person, living in the world right now, that feels honest to the artist and that hopefully moves other people. art has no rules! that to me is one of it’s most exciting qualities. not only because of how that liberates the artist, but also because it reminds me that the world we move around in every day often appears to be nothing more than a combination of scientific factors and social conventions. and yet our emotions have no boundaries, and if people are straitjacketed by biology they nonetheless yearn endlessly to wriggle free, and there’s poetry in that, however ephemeral. [end of starry-eyed rant]
Yeah, perfect. And there are myriad ways in which those who want to exclude specific references to an historical period will always fail. Of course, this sounds maybe like some populist slogan: “Just give me freedom, a Coke, and Facebook.”
I have to wonder, though, are we appropriating the death of Paul Smith, the mourning of Christine Smith and everyone else involved by trying to tell their story for them? Or is there a difference between telling someone’s story on behalf of them, and telling it for them? After all, this isn’t a story which “uses” or “utilizes” Coke and Facebook as fictional elements (e.g. “Paul Smith checked Facebook,” or a story being told through Facebook); Coke and Facebook are irreducibly elements of the story, if not the story itself. They sort of envelop or contain the death and mourning of this guy. Without them, arguably there would be no news story to speak of. There’s even a Coca-Cola/Universal ad on the page.
Mike, I think it is true that brand names and the internet can appear in fiction. But I wonder who would disagree, really? It seems like Gates and Lethem would not disagree. You have kind of taken their words out of context (and collapsed the two of them). Gates is poking fun at his own dated-ness when he quotes “he clicked send” from his own book, Preston Falls. That doesn’t seem boorish, just self-deprecatory, an acknowledgment of his age. Also, he admits, ” I just received a piece of student fiction which mentions Facebook and Skype in adjacent paragraphs; my instinct is that this is showing off, but maybe it’s no different from Jane Austen mentioning a fortepiano and a huswife on the same page.”
He seems to be saying more that he doesn’t think it’s necessary for characters to spend more than half their waking time on the internet, as he does, for a story to be believable and to move people, to record something of the “contemporary emotional landscape.” I think he’s saying that fiction writers don’t have to stay abreast of the next newest technology to write compelling work. He’s not saying that it’s bad if they do, just that it’s okay if they don’t. Those are separate things. I don’t see how that equals ignoring the adaptations of people. If anything, his saying uninterest in the idea of the internet as simulacra seems closer to the ground. Do you think the friends and family of Paul Smith are questioning whether their Facebook-platformed remembrances are part of some kind of imagined reality? I don’t.
I’d say those are pretty vain goals to an extent. It’s clear enough if someone just wants to pepper a story with timely references. The story that successfully integrates dated elements, again, I think, couldn’t be told any other way than through those elements.
A whole other discussion to be sure. The woman in the picture looks like my mom, reminds me of my mom (had ever my mom a righteous cause around which to galvanize her grief). My mom doesn’t read books because she needs reading glasses and lacks health insurance, but she does spend a lot of time online..
I saw the picture, read the pull quotes and I read the link, fully preparing myself to read something snarky or clever, making fun. Thanks for not doing that. Again, your point was well said.
Thank you for posting this. Seriously. Thank you.
romantics tend to be progressive and rebel against social norms, while sentimentalists appreciate nostalgia and tend to cling to what makes the comfortable.
props y’alls
Or, well, not vain, I guess that’s harsh, but for instance, I read As I Lay Dying recently, and I had no idea what half of the objects in the book were. But that technology, which is now so absolutely outdated, is of course expressive of a milieu; what stands out to me is not the passing of time but the reliance of a society on its technology, so that a time period becomes indissociable from the technology it produces–the technology it produces is what makes it possible, and vice versa.
maybe you’re misunderstanding me, alec. i’m not proposing that authors try to write “a timely story.” what i was describing are possible future consequences not explicitly intended by the author who uses what you call “dated elements,” which is preposterous, by the way, because MY VERY BODY AND SOUL IS MADE UP OF EXCLUSIVELY DATED ELEMENTS. it would be one part of what could be an extensive, comprehensive argument against any kind of anti-contemporaneity, “this is what Real Art is, and this is what it isn’t” type of bullshit. i think it’s small-minded and silly to think that there are such things as “successful stories” or especially stories that incorporate or integrate things “successfully.” What is this, a Model UN speech? Judge: “You successfully incorporated references to the ongoing effects of Maoist Thought in your speech on the tensions in modern-day China.” That kind of language reminds me of a stereotypical writing workshop teacher or a conservative or “this is right art/this is wrong art” (same thing?) type of magazine editor. there’s no such thing as a story that can only be told one way. no story exists until it does, and it can always be changed.
I mean, I don’t think anyone would argue that “MY VERY BODY AND SOUL IS MADE UP OF EXCLUSIVELY DATED ELEMENTS”–the only thing timeless is what is dated ahead of time. Being-towards-death etc. I’m not sure why you’re being hostile and slightly hysterical here. I’m not trying to prescribe a formula for fiction here, but if I’m a Model UN judge because there are some strategies that work for me and some that don’t, then whatever, so be it. I don’t necessarily think writing is all too different from a Model UN performance.
I meant to say I don’t think anyone would argue AGAINST your thing in all caps.
i’m also put in mind of kanye west, who says his albums are like time capsules, that he specifically got t-pain on his album during the “big t-pain year” bc A) He likes T-pain, and B) He wants ppl to look back years later and remember all the stuff from that year. also, kanye says he’s cool with wearing trendy-ass clothing even if he will eventually look ridiculous in photographs (or immediately).
is that vain? of course! who cares?????????????? writing anything is vain. and no matter what kind of writing you do, it’s a reaction, subconscious or not, to what other people are writing at that moment and what other people have written in the past. so what??????????? you’re part of a community, whether you like it or not. i celebrate it. the more community the better. if it’s vain or not “Serious Art” to respond to being alive at a specific moment in time that will never happen quite the same way again, if it’s vain to do what feels good and cool and fun, whether it’s writing or picking out clothes, then bring on the charges of vanity and un-seriousness! all the guys writing post-Barthelme, post-barfcore, or whatever the hell people write these days, all you very serious writers, you’re like the guy who wears sensible but slightly cool tennis shoes because boots are too pretentious or hightops are “too black” or “Chucks are so mainstream.” do you think anyone ever excited or inspired people with their art by sitting around fretting about stupid, meaningless shit?
you just happened to be there, sorry, alec ;)
i think writing is totally different from a Model UN performance. what of your personal emotions, your personal history, is in a competitive brainiac exhibition? you think writing is a competitive brainiac exhibition? see the later years of DFW. he realized that being the smartest guy didn’t satisfy him.
what i am saying is that you and i are bodies in time. whatever you want to express on the page and whatever you want to mention as you do that is up to you, but you see that’s what i’m saying—it’s up to you! it’s not up to prescriptivists. it’s not up to authors who do interviews for PEN America and say, gee golly, i guess fiction always ends up going back to conventional realism.
i’m not prescribing anything, whether it be contemporary references or anything else. i’m merely saying that there are no rules in art, and anyone who tells you how not to write is scared they’ve been doing it wrong. when there is no wrong.
Alec-
I am going to go reread Dying with an eye out for Objects, and make a precise list of them, and figure out which ones I “know what they are” and which ones I don’t. So excited! Weekend!
That sounds like a really cool and worthwhile project, Mimi. Let me know how it turns out!
it seems really silly at this point in time to be anxious about including references to the internet in one’s fiction. i also think it’s silly to make up or omit a brand name for fear of including an actual brand name. unless your fiction is science fiction or parallel universe fiction, we live in a world where nearly everyone uses the internet and encounters/interacts with brand names on a daily basis. i can’t think of any convincing argument against.
you want your fiction to be “timeless”? probably just about any “great” novel you can think of has time-specific references; their time period may not have been quite as branded and there was no internet, but it’s the same thing. i would say to a confused individual, “you don’t know what fiction ‘looks like’ or ‘should be like’ in the year 2010, you don’t know what ‘timeless fiction’ is now. that’s because you haven’t created it yet. stop being a worrywart and stop being so precious, and go create however you desire. that will be ‘the right way.'”
care to elaborate?
Funny post, but can we quit it with the unnecessary quote marks? It’s getting obnoxious…
that is a good rebuttal, amy, especially the last bit about gates’s disinterest in the idea of the internet as simulacra and his willingness to concede that interaction with such technology might be part of peoples’ lives in a real way, even if he isn’t sure how, as he can only see it as distraction/fetish/etc. which, yeah, i didn’t give him enough credit for..
in which case my point might be that the story linked—which i still think is more interesting than the interview—shows how the “how” is unexpectedly simple and obvious if we walk around a little bit on the ground we’re supposedly staying close to… and i still think i have a problem with the whole framing of it as “fiction writers staying abreast of the next newest technology..” that framing, which is popular, privileges some auteur-like duty to one’s own abilities of prophecy and philosophy, which seems very far from “the ground..” which i guess is the point of your last two sentences..
yeah, that is a good criticism alec.. that is why i have a problem with the whole idea of framing it as “use,” some accomplishment of contemporary incorporation, or, alternatively, rebellion against incorporation, which both reduce things to incorporation, which sort of seems too self-regarding and beside the point of just paying attention…
Nice post. Mike Young, I agree: the story is sad and beautiful. Contemporary writers who think they’re elevated above Facebook and coca cola are pretentious and boring to me, like the girl I met in college who “never” watched TV and marvelled at the fact that I did. Meet your readers, folks. They are human beings, members of this society and– GUESS WHAT– so are you. That is nothing to be ashamed of or necessarily hide from in your work.
technology references that date fiction: he got up to change the channel, she looked in the phone book, he paid the man as he pumped the gas, she put in a video tape, the tv was getting bad reception, we looked up Iraq in the encyclopedia.
hi matt: i am not a fan of faddish liberal scare quoting, either, but i wasn’t highlighting “putting” or “used” to be cute or disaffected or ironic or funny or strike a pose or use scare quotes as a high five to commune myself with a certain scene ..
the reason i put those two words in quotes is because i feel skeptical about how casually they sit where they are, and i wanted to call attention to the way they represent the idea that we often talk about the world as something to be used or artificially inserted into these terrific “made up” constructions we masterful storytellers whip up “in our minds,” which is an attitude i sometimes feel skeptical about.. sometimes i feel that such an attitude is like pheidippides sitting around leaving the message undelivered until he thinks of a clever enough way to deliver it.. i don’t always feel this way, and i know that this attitude is probably even more exasperating than excessive “” garnishing—especially in this camp—but i do have sometimes have strong feelings toward an idea of storyteller as agent of social record, especially of those unrecorded or dismissed for whatever reason..
hi melissa, thanks for commenting. i agree with you. tho i’m guessing some clever person might point out that the people in the story linked probably aren’t our readers… which is a whole other discussion, i guess..
he sat on a chair
no probz =)
Seems to me you could leave in the Myspace reference rather than replace it with Facebook if that’s what “sounds” better (alliteratively etc) and is what your character would have said at the time (in the book’s timeline) and if it is what works best for you. If you wanted to.
The time when Myspace was emerging as the ruling social-networking phenom was a very exciting time, imo, because it was a time when people were really changing (expanding) their notions of what it means to communicate, and how. I remember the first time I heard “Grass” by Animal Collective because this chick I thought was cool posted it (thus adding the song to her own personal “brand”) on her Myspace page.
Now imagine an overhead shot of the new millennium timeline, zooming in closer and closer to the exact moment I first heard that song. Sparkle.
what’s “wrong” with dating fiction? doesn’t that build in future nostalgia or gesture at the passing of time? couldn’t those things be seen as “positives”?
he turned on the oven.
this kind of conversation is like authors willingly turning themselves into pathetic dinosaurs. “serious” writers/philosophers in the “olden days” didn’t write in magazines with ads in them, bc those things didn’t exist. then they did exist. then serious writers published there. there didn’t use to be podcasts. now the new yorker has podcasts. now serious writers appear on them. facebook, blogging, all of these things are just another step.
the thing that alienates me from writers who talk/think in the general manner of this linked conversation is this notion of preserving the myth of the author as a dignified person with well-established boundaries and tastes in their social behavior and the distribution of their writing (if you read old Paris Review interviews, most authors back then didn’t talk like that, so there’s some insidious conservative impulse taking over, apparently).
i don’t want to be an author whose social etiquette resembles that of an academic or a lawyer or banker or something. artists have and always will be many things, but i don’t know how attempting to be proper or worrying about what’s acceptable or what not to do is going to benefit the creation of art by a living person, living in the world right now, that feels honest to the artist and that hopefully moves other people. art has no rules! that to me is one of it’s most exciting qualities. not only because of how that liberates the artist, but also because it reminds me that the world we move around in every day often appears to be nothing more than a combination of scientific factors and social conventions. and yet our emotions have no boundaries, and if people are straitjacketed by biology they nonetheless yearn endlessly to wriggle free, and there’s poetry in that, however ephemeral. [end of starry-eyed rant]
Yeah, perfect. And there are myriad ways in which those who want to exclude specific references to an historical period will always fail. Of course, this sounds maybe like some populist slogan: “Just give me freedom, a Coke, and Facebook.”
I have to wonder, though, are we appropriating the death of Paul Smith, the mourning of Christine Smith and everyone else involved by trying to tell their story for them? Or is there a difference between telling someone’s story on behalf of them, and telling it for them? After all, this isn’t a story which “uses” or “utilizes” Coke and Facebook as fictional elements (e.g. “Paul Smith checked Facebook,” or a story being told through Facebook); Coke and Facebook are irreducibly elements of the story, if not the story itself. They sort of envelop or contain the death and mourning of this guy. Without them, arguably there would be no news story to speak of. There’s even a Coca-Cola/Universal ad on the page.
Mike, I think it is true that brand names and the internet can appear in fiction. But I wonder who would disagree, really? It seems like Gates and Lethem would not disagree. You have kind of taken their words out of context (and collapsed the two of them). Gates is poking fun at his own dated-ness when he quotes “he clicked send” from his own book, Preston Falls. That doesn’t seem boorish, just self-deprecatory, an acknowledgment of his age. Also, he admits, ” I just received a piece of student fiction which mentions Facebook and Skype in adjacent paragraphs; my instinct is that this is showing off, but maybe it’s no different from Jane Austen mentioning a fortepiano and a huswife on the same page.”
He seems to be saying more that he doesn’t think it’s necessary for characters to spend more than half their waking time on the internet, as he does, for a story to be believable and to move people, to record something of the “contemporary emotional landscape.” I think he’s saying that fiction writers don’t have to stay abreast of the next newest technology to write compelling work. He’s not saying that it’s bad if they do, just that it’s okay if they don’t. Those are separate things. I don’t see how that equals ignoring the adaptations of people. If anything, his saying uninterest in the idea of the internet as simulacra seems closer to the ground. Do you think the friends and family of Paul Smith are questioning whether their Facebook-platformed remembrances are part of some kind of imagined reality? I don’t.
I’d say those are pretty vain goals to an extent. It’s clear enough if someone just wants to pepper a story with timely references. The story that successfully integrates dated elements, again, I think, couldn’t be told any other way than through those elements.
A whole other discussion to be sure. The woman in the picture looks like my mom, reminds me of my mom (had ever my mom a righteous cause around which to galvanize her grief). My mom doesn’t read books because she needs reading glasses and lacks health insurance, but she does spend a lot of time online..
I saw the picture, read the pull quotes and I read the link, fully preparing myself to read something snarky or clever, making fun. Thanks for not doing that. Again, your point was well said.
romantics tend to be progressive and rebel against social norms, while sentimentalists appreciate nostalgia and tend to cling to what makes the comfortable.
props y’alls
Or, well, not vain, I guess that’s harsh, but for instance, I read As I Lay Dying recently, and I had no idea what half of the objects in the book were. But that technology, which is now so absolutely outdated, is of course expressive of a milieu; what stands out to me is not the passing of time but the reliance of a society on its technology, so that a time period becomes indissociable from the technology it produces–the technology it produces is what makes it possible, and vice versa.
maybe you’re misunderstanding me, alec. i’m not proposing that authors try to write “a timely story.” what i was describing are possible future consequences not explicitly intended by the author who uses what you call “dated elements,” which is preposterous, by the way, because MY VERY BODY AND SOUL IS MADE UP OF EXCLUSIVELY DATED ELEMENTS. it would be one part of what could be an extensive, comprehensive argument against any kind of anti-contemporaneity, “this is what Real Art is, and this is what it isn’t” type of bullshit. i think it’s small-minded and silly to think that there are such things as “successful stories” or especially stories that incorporate or integrate things “successfully.” What is this, a Model UN speech? Judge: “You successfully incorporated references to the ongoing effects of Maoist Thought in your speech on the tensions in modern-day China.” That kind of language reminds me of a stereotypical writing workshop teacher or a conservative or “this is right art/this is wrong art” (same thing?) type of magazine editor. there’s no such thing as a story that can only be told one way. no story exists until it does, and it can always be changed.
I mean, I don’t think anyone would argue that “MY VERY BODY AND SOUL IS MADE UP OF EXCLUSIVELY DATED ELEMENTS”–the only thing timeless is what is dated ahead of time. Being-towards-death etc. I’m not sure why you’re being hostile and slightly hysterical here. I’m not trying to prescribe a formula for fiction here, but if I’m a Model UN judge because there are some strategies that work for me and some that don’t, then whatever, so be it. I don’t necessarily think writing is all too different from a Model UN performance.
I meant to say I don’t think anyone would argue AGAINST your thing in all caps.
i’m also put in mind of kanye west, who says his albums are like time capsules, that he specifically got t-pain on his album during the “big t-pain year” bc A) He likes T-pain, and B) He wants ppl to look back years later and remember all the stuff from that year. also, kanye says he’s cool with wearing trendy-ass clothing even if he will eventually look ridiculous in photographs (or immediately).
is that vain? of course! who cares?????????????? writing anything is vain. and no matter what kind of writing you do, it’s a reaction, subconscious or not, to what other people are writing at that moment and what other people have written in the past. so what??????????? you’re part of a community, whether you like it or not. i celebrate it. the more community the better. if it’s vain or not “Serious Art” to respond to being alive at a specific moment in time that will never happen quite the same way again, if it’s vain to do what feels good and cool and fun, whether it’s writing or picking out clothes, then bring on the charges of vanity and un-seriousness! all the guys writing post-Barthelme, post-barfcore, or whatever the hell people write these days, all you very serious writers, you’re like the guy who wears sensible but slightly cool tennis shoes because boots are too pretentious or hightops are “too black” or “Chucks are so mainstream.” do you think anyone ever excited or inspired people with their art by sitting around fretting about stupid, meaningless shit?
you just happened to be there, sorry, alec ;)
i think writing is totally different from a Model UN performance. what of your personal emotions, your personal history, is in a competitive brainiac exhibition? you think writing is a competitive brainiac exhibition? see the later years of DFW. he realized that being the smartest guy didn’t satisfy him.
what i am saying is that you and i are bodies in time. whatever you want to express on the page and whatever you want to mention as you do that is up to you, but you see that’s what i’m saying—it’s up to you! it’s not up to prescriptivists. it’s not up to authors who do interviews for PEN America and say, gee golly, i guess fiction always ends up going back to conventional realism.
i’m not prescribing anything, whether it be contemporary references or anything else. i’m merely saying that there are no rules in art, and anyone who tells you how not to write is scared they’ve been doing it wrong. when there is no wrong.
Alec-
I am going to go reread Dying with an eye out for Objects, and make a precise list of them, and figure out which ones I “know what they are” and which ones I don’t. So excited! Weekend!
That sounds like a really cool and worthwhile project, Mimi. Let me know how it turns out!
that is a good rebuttal, amy, especially the last bit about gates’s disinterest in the idea of the internet as simulacra and his willingness to concede that interaction with such technology might be part of peoples’ lives in a real way, even if he isn’t sure how, as he can only see it as distraction/fetish/etc. which, yeah, i didn’t give him enough credit for..
in which case my point might be that the story linked—which i still think is more interesting than the interview—shows how the “how” is unexpectedly simple and obvious if we walk around a little bit on the ground we’re supposedly staying close to… and i still think i have a problem with the whole framing of it as “fiction writers staying abreast of the next newest technology..” that framing, which is popular, privileges some auteur-like duty to one’s own abilities of prophecy and philosophy, which seems very far from “the ground..” which i guess is the point of your last two sentences..
yeah, that is a good criticism alec.. that is why i have a problem with the whole idea of framing it as “use,” some accomplishment of contemporary incorporation, or, alternatively, rebellion against incorporation, which both reduce things to incorporation, which sort of seems too self-regarding and beside the point of just paying attention…
That’s a good point, Mimi. I have to think about this. I’m trying to be up-to-the-minute contemporary and also somehow out-of-time, a ridiculous ambition. If I reinstate MySpace and this other reference to the Commander-in-Chief’s grandfather’s connects to the Nazis, then it firmly places the narrative a few years back, which may be OK. Hmmm… thanks for making me rethink this. Still thinking…
That’s a good point, Mimi. I have to think about this. I’m trying to be up-to-the-minute contemporary and also somehow out-of-time, a ridiculous ambition. If I reinstate MySpace and this other reference to the Commander-in-Chief’s grandfather’s connects to the Nazis, then it firmly places the narrative a few years back, which may be OK. Hmmm… thanks for making me rethink this. Still thinking…
Melissa, I agree with you. I think writers should be careful about how thickly they pour in the tech references, but I get annoyed at the total deniers too. I had a story come back with an editor’s note that he couldn’t read past the word myspace on the first page and the more I thought about it the more annoyed I became. I was well aware, when I chose that word, of what it carried, but I chose it over “the internet” or “a social networking site” to avoid generic fluff and to convey a specific sort of shitty/amateurish/sketchy-this-person-i-met-online-is-in-my-homeness. I respect that editors can choose to be picky about that sort of thing if they want but if it’s such a hard rule maybe it should be specified in sub guidelines.
He went swimming in the Gulf of Mexico
I’ve never understood the argument that writers shouldn’t include pop cultural references in their work for fear of dating that work, as if the best work merely sprinkles in pop cultural references as some sort of crutch or lazy shorthand. This argument, and even some of the counter-arguments, miss the larger point, which is that the writing must be convincing. Many of my favorite stories and novels include references to stuff I know nothing about it, but it doesn’t matter because the writing is convincing enough to make me believe in those references without having to consult a dictionary, whether they be pop cultural, scientific, whatever.
American Lit has been quite engaged with technology and science for over 100 years (post-Darwin). One could argue that modernism itself was founded upon an intense engagement with language and technology, as well as science. There’s also a clear relationship between aesthetic shifts the last 100 years and cinema/film technique, and Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” could easily be a text on writing fiction.
Melissa, I agree with you. I think writers should be careful about how thickly they pour in the tech references, but I get annoyed at the total deniers too. I had a story come back with an editor’s note that he couldn’t read past the word myspace on the first page and the more I thought about it the more annoyed I became. I was well aware, when I chose that word, of what it carried, but I chose it over “the internet” or “a social networking site” to avoid generic fluff and to convey a specific sort of shitty/amateurish/sketchy-this-person-i-met-online-is-in-my-homeness. I respect that editors can choose to be picky about that sort of thing if they want but if it’s such a hard rule maybe it should be specified in sub guidelines.
He went swimming in the Gulf of Mexico
I’ve never understood the argument that writers shouldn’t include pop cultural references in their work for fear of dating that work, as if the best work merely sprinkles in pop cultural references as some sort of crutch or lazy shorthand. This argument, and even some of the counter-arguments, miss the larger point, which is that the writing must be convincing. Many of my favorite stories and novels include references to stuff I know nothing about it, but it doesn’t matter because the writing is convincing enough to make me believe in those references without having to consult a dictionary, whether they be pop cultural, scientific, whatever.
American Lit has been quite engaged with technology and science for over 100 years (post-Darwin). One could argue that modernism itself was founded upon an intense engagement with language and technology, as well as science. There’s also a clear relationship between aesthetic shifts the last 100 years and cinema/film technique, and Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” could easily be a text on writing fiction.
Some time back I wrote a short hybrid describing a cultural dislocation-by-internet experience, an affect that was both imagined and real.
Here, if you like:
“Call for Intercession: OED”
Some time back I wrote a short hybrid describing a cultural dislocation-by-internet experience, an affect that was both imagined and real.
Here, if you like:
“Call for Intercession: OED”