In Everett’s new book, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, that authority, the authority of the very narrative we are reading (to the extent we can unravel the narrative) is itself questioned, quite deliberately, as Everett takes storytelling, and fiction as a mode of storytelling, for targets of mockery. This quality in Everett’s work, which also characterizes such previous novels as Glyph and Erasure, is most frequently described as metafictional and postmodern, but I think the impulse behind it still best regarded as satirical rather than postmodern per se. While Everett does blatantly and persistently call attention to the artifice of fiction-making, the object seems less to simply complicate the reader’s response to the act of narration and to disrupt the maintenance of illusion than to expose both notions to travesty.  Fiction as a literary form is itself not spared the hard edge of Everett’s satire. Among postwar American writers whose work consistently incorporates self-reflexive strategies, perhaps only Gilbert Sorrentino so relentlessly dismantles the existing support structures of fiction — the novel in particular — as does Everett, although Sorrentino seems more interested than Everett in supplying new such structures, even if they are only temporary, made to fit the specific work at hand.

In Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Everett does not seem engaged in an effort to replace the blasted remnants of the conventional novel with a fresh form of his own invention. It would be more  accurate to say this novel settles for deforming form as a self-sufficient aesthetic principle. […]

It’s the willingness that is so troubling, the willingness to waste their time and energy and money trying to acquire proximity to social capital. And while I do believe artists should be supported, this belief, ideally, would be because people value the art, not because they have some fetish about being near the person who creates the art.

What makes this form of exploitation particularly clever is that it doesn’t look like exploitation — it looks like happy people sharing a good time. On the surface it might even seem anti-capitalist, but when looked at more closely, capitalism’s power to infuse itself in all modes of social interaction, from sex to the grocery-store checkout line, is on full display here. And while there’s something refreshing and sincere about Palmer’s willingness to participate so vigorously on capitalism’s front lines, the sad part is that she doesn’t seem to realize what she’s doing. She mistakes her exploitation of others as a way for helping them, and the people she exploits, rather than feeling taken advantage of, might say they’re having a good time. But above all, we can see that Palmer is exploiting herself — that she’s all too happy to offer herself up as a product, which for a celebrity or a rock star, is not anything new or novel. […]

It has to do with the idea of indebtedness. Biographical writing is completely riddled with indebtedness. You saw how long my acknowledgements are. My debts are to all those people who helped me, whose stories and memories and testimonies and documents made these portraits possible. And of course I’m incredibly indebted to my subjects. Each of the three of them was indebted to the people in her life, and really often acknowledged that. These those networks of indebtedness — emotional, financial, professional — , particularly to other women, were really important to them. Emotional, financial, professional networks.

Madge Garland, for example, was committed, up to the end of her life, to supporting younger women journalists as they started their careers. She really encouraged them. I met several of those people, who talked about their debts to her. How she simply encouraged them at a time when what they were doing wasn’t so common. It wasn’t like, for example, you: graduating from college at a time when it’s clearer to you, that [writing] is something you could do. It was a different moment, even in the seventies. And she remembered so acutely her struggle to write, and the people who had supported her. It was very important to her to pass that along. […]

I’d like to argue, though, that there is more here than just a seasonal shift — that a more cosmic confluence exists between Passover, Easter, and baseball that enriches and enlivens why so many of us love so dearly this age-old American pastime. Here, I want to turn to the late Jacques Barzun, who died this past fall. A cultural historian and philosopher of education, Barzun would be limited, and made more bland, by the term eccentric.

I know of few thinkers who hold the range and depth of Barzun, but of the many subjects under his gaze, baseball played a famous, if minor, part. In his now classic essay, “On Baseball,” Barzun pulls off an incredible, Mariano Rivera-esque closing argument, in which he claims that nobody in the United Kingdom actually knows the rules of cricket, while nearly all Americans are steeped in at least a basic knowledge of baseball, the true realm of clear ideas…

What baseball has built into it’s very structure is an idea of the commons; that open, democratic, and deeply social space where these sometimes minute, sometimes tremendous dramas can play out and develop in space and time. “Being spread out, baseball has something sociable and friendly about it that I especially love. It is graphic and choreographic,” Barzun writes. And here, I believe, is the best and most venerable in both the sport and the religious rituals that serve to herald spring. When the rules are acted out as choreography towards a deeper commons, not as affectless limitations, they do good, and echo, if not necessarily bring physically forth, the eternal spring. […]

“The idea for Taxi was influenced to a large degree by the content of the maqama, in particular those written at the end of the 19^th century. The maqama is able to conjure up a vision of society in the mind of the reader and engage with what is happening in society. In one particular maqama written at the end of the 19^th century, a man is buried at the end of Mohammed Ali’s reign and rises from his grave in 1879. A passerby takes him by the hand and leads him through the streets, through his shock and surprise at the changes that have taken place in those 60 years, and he tries to show the man what has happened in society. My idea was built on this structure – that someone rides a taxi, each time with a different driver, he gets surprised, and each driver would give him a piece of the puzzle. Taxi isn’t a collection of short stories, or a novel, or a piece of journalism, it is a maqama, an old style of Arabic literature that began in the Abbasid era. Each individual chapter is one facet of the greater picture, which is the street in Cairo in that particular moment.

Taxi tries to express what was happening on the street and in society in the moment in history it was written in. Its goal was to be expressive and representative of what was happening society. I felt in 2005, amidst the parliamentary and presidential elections, that it was a moment of real social tension on the street. There were big discussions going on, there was clear verbal violence in this historical moment, and there were the beginnings of political mobilization. People say that Kefaya started in 2004 as an expression of the social and political mobilization that was truly present in 2004 and 2005 and which has lasted and continues to increase until today. I wanted to be present in that moment of mobilization, and write a book that expressed the tone of society in the moment, and the state of anger on the streets I saw very clearly.” […]

“Dworkin allows John Cage to be correct about silence. John Cage says that absolute silence is impossible. This is an error but not an offense. Nevertheless, silence, like shadows and holes, are absences of material objects. How to grasp their ontology is a challenge. Attempts to reduce talk of absence in terms of what it is an absence of fail. The hole in a donut is not part of the material substance of the donut. Nor is it another kind of material substance. Similarly with silence. Silence is just an absence of noise. It can be heard, just as a hole can be touched and seen, just as a shadow can be seen. But these are non-concrete objects. We can see that they are not subjective because we know they existed before minds evolved. They will out-live minds. So Cage is wrong to deny silence. Because modern artists, musicians, writers and philosophers have been repulsed by negative reality much of Dworkin’s thesis is based on Cage’s error. Philosophers talking about negative existence have been wooly like Heidegger on Holderlin, and can be accused of false advertising. They have refused to give full dues to negative existence. Silence, erasure, blankness have all been sites for discussing something less than absolute lessness, in that their silence is not really silent, their erasure not wholly erased, their blankness not absolutely blank. Dworkin is not wooly though, but detailed and immediate and economic. Jed Rasula has called him “the Barnum of a peculiar new circus called No Medium.” So his poetic imagination turns what I have pedantically called an error into an enchantement. The approach is the equivalent of camping in a fenestrated villa, on charcoal and the debris of period furniture.”

[Read the rest at 3AM Magazine]

“I came to Harris’ work through his film Highway (1958), which features extended b/w shots of American highways and from American highways in the 1950s set to a jazz & rock n roll soundtrack. There’s a fun interpenetration of the visual and sonic rhythms, which sees lampposts whizz by at the beat of a snare drum and the film appears to affirm a zeitgeist-y feel of freedom, freeways and jazzy beats reminiscent of Kerouac’s On the Road(1957), which came out around the same time. However, I think Harris’ vision of the highway is not wholly affirmative and resists falling back on Kerouac’s nostalgia for the freedom of the American highway. Though accompanied by lively sound and visuals, for example, Highway’s five long minutes eventually secrete a sense of repetition and monotony, caught in an almost infernal circularity which ensnares driver and viewer alike in a circuit without exit, repeating the same shots over and over. Turn off the sound and the film starkly presents nothing so much as the tedium of driving on America’s roads, exposing the hypocrisy of both the film’s own combination of video- and soundtrack and the mythos of American freedom they appear to evoke. What if Kerouac and Harris represent divergent responses to the construction of Eisenhower’s Interstate Highways, inaugurated by the Federal Aid Highway Acts? Famously, Kerouac’s On the Road is a lament for the good old days of driving unfettered across the States; perhaps Harris’ Highway is a deeper critique of America’s passion for freedom that finds itself routed into conduits controlled by government and big business since the formation of the Good Roads movement in the late nineteenth century.” 

[Read more at One Plus One]

Vladimir Nabokov never hid the fact that he didn’t really have his chops as a writer for the stage. “By nature, I am no dramatist,” he wrote in his introduction to the screenplay for Lolita — a judgment he earned over the course of several labored attempts.

Nabokov’s career as a playwright occurred mostly in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s when, having fled Russia with little more than the clothes on his back, he was doing everything he could to support his struggling family. The plays didn’t help much; they were rarely, if ever, produced, and it isn’t hard to see why — even if you are naturally inclined to give a genius the benefit of many doubts.

On the surface, it seems like he might have succeeded in this career, as his fiction has always had a certain theatricality to it. So many of his characters are lost in plays of their own making, bent on staging their own version of reality. But telling a story in dialogue cramped his style; even in his books, it wasn’t his best means of expression. Like Proust, he was more in his element writing from a deeply interior level, usually through a single tortured consciousness, a single fractured perspective. That’s when his incredibly colorful and comic style took flight, and why he ruled the novel and short story in ways he never could the stage. […]

The privatization of public institutions, the deterioration of social welfare programs, the unpredictability of global markets and mass domestic pay-cuts and layoffs have reduced millions of Americans’ plans to uncertain daydreams. Berlant writes of “the increasing corrosion of security as a condition of life for workers across different concentrations of economic and political privilege,” which is to say that precarity is no longer reserved for the hyper-vulnerable poor. From the aspiring middle class to the hubristic nouveau riche, people along the socioeconomic spectrum are exposed to growing financial risk and diminishing protective structures. And no major city in America knows the consequences of this vicious combination better than Detroit.

The 2012 film Detropia, directed by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing,meditates on this creeping precarity, echoing Berlant along the way. Whether or not it’s a good film is a question I’ll leave for a proper review; I’m more interested here in its genre and texture, and their relevance to the current economic and social situation. Detropia is not a stirring call to arms, nor is it a tragic exposure film. It doesn’t trade in shock or pity. It’s a slow, tentative, subdued, and non-prognostic study of a city hovering just above collapse. If we trust Berlant’s observations throughout Cruel Optimism, and I do, the film’s ambivalent affect typifies life in moments of protracted crisis. […]

Like drone warfare, we have traded the sticky morass of the personal for the remote safety of the technological. But at the end of the day, we know that something is missing on this new frontier. That’s why, when it comes to the people we really care about — our Osama Bin Ladens, as opposed to our Abu Yahya al-Libis — we power down our digital proxies, put on pants, and head to our targets’ compounds, in person, at one in the morning.

At the end of the joke, Bellamy finally convinces Kim to get out of bed and come to his house. Unfortunately, his booty call was as doomed as his defense of Mike Tyson, who would ultimately serve three years in prison for his crime. Kim arrives at Bellamy’s place, as promised, but when he opens the door, the comedian discovers that she has brought her surly friend along.

So maybe we have always desired a buffer in these types of interactions, and the technology has finally arrived to provide it. Still, I can’t help thinking that we were better off without this safety net, that there was more to the booty call than simply getting the booty. This kind of nostalgia is pointless, of course; the booty text has arrived, and the booty call has commenced its walk of shame. But booty text just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Bark if you’re with me. […]