According to Harper’s Index, in 1988 there were 2,343 exclamation points in The Bonfire of the Vanities; in 1990 that number had remained. Harper’s seems keen on addressing this, no doubt due to their rhetorical statistics. I can’t imagine how an author wouldn’t be self-conscious of the, say, thousandth exclamation point!…though Céline’s endless ellipses is just as tiresome…which makes me wonder is syntax style or mere muscle memory over the keyboard? If a mark is given the honor of sentience, shouldn’t that honor be met with profoundly grave and troublesome responsibility? Self-assured writing, put simply, is douchey, like Henry Miller with a gigantic contraceptive sponge.

Victor LaValle, author of Big Machine, The Ecstatic, and Slapboxing with Jesus (and, full disclosure, a guy who blurbed one of my books), on his early-20s period of obesity, depression, and phone sex: “Have you ever known men or women who don’t get any kind of loving for years? They get weird. The women become either monstrously drab or they costume themselves in ways that make them seem unreal; they externalise their inner fantasies and come to believe that – on some level – they really are elves or princesses or, most disturbing of all, children again. And the men? They’re even worse. Men who are denied affection for too long devolve into some kind of rage-filled hominoid. Their anger becomes palpable. You can almost feel the wrath emanating from their pores. Lonely women destroy themselves; lonely men threaten the world.”

“But while Lish’s work can always be likened to self-pleasure, self-pleasure—mine and yours—cannot always be likened to Lish’s work. It is in this way—in its personal, private aspect—that his inky spatter is truly seminal. The first person, the ascendant voice of the past two centuries—from Dostoyevsky’s underground origins to Beckett’s authorial endgame—is today the shrillest voice of daily expression: the online overshare, the chat-window confessional. What once was literature—revelatory direct address—has become blogorrhea: the timestamped account of what happened this morning, of what our peeves and attractions are, of what we do to ourselves and one another by night. Lish was former laureate of that plaint, of its degrees of self-knowledge, its valences of tone. If Lish’s soliloquies have any counsel for today’s solipsistic culture it’s this: Every “I” will always be a fiction; every first person is the last person you were.” — Josh Cohen, from his Bookforum review of Lish’s Collected Fictions

At Dennis Cooper’s blog it’s Sad Keanu day.