September 2011 Wind-up

Since I wrote about 90% of all posts from my former workplace (former, yes, indeed. But don't worry, they didn't fire me for blogging related reasons) there hasn't been much posting in the last couple months on my behalf. So I decided, like, today, that I at least give you little list-like impressions of what is, or rather was, going on in my literary, filmic, musical or otherwise musings once a month. This is less inspired than just kicked-off by Nick Hornby's monthly column "Stuff I've Been Reading" for The Believer, which I've been reading this month. Actually I just read it a couple minutes ago. Since I hadn't known at the beginning of the month that I would start such an endeavor at it's very end, I have to guess some of the stuff that made apparances this September of 2011 but failed to inscribe itself deeply into my memory. And since, quoting Bill Pullman in "Lost Highway", 'I like to remember things in my own way, not necessarily in the way they happened', don't blame me if any of the following, or preceding, for that matter, information is incorrect or fails to register with whatever fascist-mode of truth your brain is operating on. So, here it goes:

Stuff that I bought:

• Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, BluRay
• Marcel Proust, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit, 13 Bd.
• Sigmund Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse & Psychologie des Unbewußten
• Ernest Hemingway, Tod am Nachmittag
• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
• J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
• The Believer, September 2011 issue
• The Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers (Revised & Expanded)
• A ticket for the upcoming BUSH concert in Cologne on Nov, 8th 2011

Stuff that I read and watched and listened to:

• Bush, The Sea of Memories
• Daily Bread; Well, You're not invited
• The Decemberists, Calamity Song
• Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
• Lars Von Trier, The Element of Crime
• Lars Von Trier, Epidemic
• Lars Von Trier, Europa
• Lars Von Trier, Breaking The Waves
• Lars Von Trier, The Idiots
• Lars Von Trier, Dogville
• Lars Von Trier, Manderlay
• Jorgen Leth, The Perfect Human
• Lars Von Trier, The Five Obstructions
• Lars Von Trier, The Boss of it All
• Thomas Vinterberg, Dear Wendy
• Seth Gordon, Horrible Bosses
• John Michael McDonagh, The Guard
• Californication, Season 4
• some U.S. Open
• Bernhard Schlink, Der Vorleser
• Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close
• The Believer, September 2011 issue (unfinished yet, it's a bathroom read)
• The Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers (same as above)
• David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (in ASFTINDA)
• Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (not finished yet)

Well, what can I say? I was preparing for Lars Von Trier's Melancholia by watching all, almost, the stuff that I hadn't watched before and by rewatching all the stuff that I had watched before. And although Dancer In The Dark and Antichrist and Riget are not on that list, I pretty much got it all covered. I have to say that I was really surprised of the variety of his work. Especially his early Europa-trilogy is quite distinct from his later works in visual as well as in narrative style. All of them, The Element Of Crime, Epidemic, Europa, and Dogville at the very forefront, distinguish him as a master storyteller. And apart from the gut-wrenching border-crossings of the human soul starting with Breaking The Waves, he can just as easily pull off an extremely funny comedy like The Boss Of It All. Alright, yes. The last 15 or so years have been a constant tumbling down the rabbit hole of depression and we will have to see if Melancholia will be the end of that or just another apex in his CV. But even in this condition he is an extremely gifted filmmaker. I'm looking forward to everything he gets on the big screen.

Proust: I do not know when or if I will ever have the time to read him but this complete German edition of his À la recherche du temps perdu smiled at me from an 'each book 1€' flea market box. I got the whole bunch for 9€! Also, since I once owned the complete Freud Studienausgabe and sold it on eBay several years ago and now it costs like 100€ up and I'm trying to get my hands back at those books, I got volumes I and III for a euro each at the flea-market. The Hemingway I bought for my brother since he loved The Old Man And The Sea and The Sun Also Rises so much, but doesn't read English so well, hence the German edition. Death In The Afternoon was the only Hemingway I could find there and since there was the very last bullfight in Barcelona this week I thought it would be a nice gift. I mailed the book to him and he didn't respond whatsoever to this niceness of mine. Hm...


Today I bought the Salinger and Lolita. And this is probably the very first time in my life that I bought something for myself of which I have a perfectly good copy at home already. The Catcher In The Rye, that is. Actually there had already been two copies on the bookshelf, the other one belongs to my girlfriend. But I just couldn't resist the wonderful book jacket. It looks so graceful and dignified. I had to buy it. And then I had to think of that Mel Gibson flick, Conspiracy Theory, in which he owns a couple dozen copies of this very novel but can't give a reason why. Or at least I didn't get to know the reason, I never watched the movie, but know just that one scene. Weird, isn't it?


And I stumbled upon The Believer magazine, which is a part of McSweeney's, which, respectively, is owned and published by Dave Eggers, sort of, because of an interview with Don DeLillo and Bret Easton Ellis, so naturally I had to get ahold of a copy. There is also an interview with Jason Schwartzman in it. But this darn Ellis DeLillo interview is ONE YEAR OLD!!! It took place in Paris in October 2010 when both of them promoted their latest novels, Imperial Bedrooms and Point Omega, respectively. And since I'm an avid reader of DeLillo and Ellis interviews, there was about nothing new in it, because they told all that stuff to dozens of other interviewers already. That sucked. The Believer Book of Writer's Talking To Writers arrived a couple days later and at least I do not know so much of the contents of those interviews beforehand, because, frankly, I know just about half a dozen of the (three and a half dozen) writers featured in it. And that is a good thing. I like interviews with writers and those are quite interesting. They nevertheless never reach the quality or length of those featured in The Paris Review.


And the really big thing after Lars Von Trier: I, as you already know, started reading Gravity's Rainbow. I'm about 130 pages deep now and don't really have any words that I would want to W.A.S.T.E. upon this. Therefore I will end this post with the video for The Decemberists's Calamity Song. And I have to make that clear: It is the video, not the song that I like and appreciate for obvious reasons.

emotion and irony in contemporary fiction

"What I'm mostly trying to talk about is what it feels like emotionally to be 34 in this country."

This is from a DFW interview from Spring 1997 that can be found here and it pretty much sums up what is going on and what has to be done in serious contemporary fiction, i.e. the turning-away from postmodern irony and the turning toward emotional truth. You can see it in DFWs work, most recently in The unfinished Pale King, you can see it in Alan Ball's Six Feet Under, it is what Bret Easton Ellis did in Lunar Park, what Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was all about, as well as Foer's Everything Is Illuminated and also recent TV-shows as Bored to Death - although sometimes they hide it very well -, it is what Terrence Malick does and what Jonathan Franzen's Freedom tries to do. Also Running With Scissors comes to mind, and quite strongly though, i.e. the movie version, I haven't read the memoir. And this is what an LA Times critic had to say about it :

"Murphy, who created the creepy, funny, lunatic "Nip/Tuck," is a master of mordant and macabre camp. But here he loses his teeth, seeming to lack any ironic distance from material that practically begs for it."

The critic herself doesn't seem to lack the ironic distance that she is actually begging for, though. I don't know where to find it right now, but Jonathan Franzen said it in one of the myriad of interviews he gave in the wake of Freedom. He said that in The Corrections he used irony also and especially to distance himself from certain ideas and emotions presented in the novel. You can basically say anything you want with irony and then easily back out of it if people disagree with you, thus you don't have to stand your ground on very intimate issues, issues that are and feel way too personal to let anyone attack or make fun of them. He said that he wrote a wholeheartedly unironic novel with Freedom, that he eschewed former techniques of irony to get closer to the emotional core of what he wanted to say. And that he is quite aware that exactly that makes him so much more vulnerable if people dislike his work because now the work is much closer to what being Jonathan Franzen really is like. Closer to the emotional truth that is Jonathan Franzen. But people might misread that for sentimentality and naiveté.

Here is something I found in an IRC chat transcript with DFW* shortly after the release of Infinite Jest (and if you are too young to actually have been in one yourself or are now like, my age, and want to get a nice pretty nostalgic trip into the early times of the internet and 90's chat-rooms, you have to read the whole thing (if it doesn't redirect you, click on the Impatient? link). This is pre-facebook stuff. There were actually online chat-rooms BEFORE the internet. Grab yourself a cup of coffee or your beverage-of-cozy-choice and travel into 1996's cyberspace):

"The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion" and

"I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt as sadness. I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental."

Irony can be a lot of fun, no doubt. And as Dave puts it, we can't escape it because we breathe the stuff everyday. And that makes it actually hard to snap out of it sometimes. (Is the transition to this paragraph too rough? I had a hard time coming up with a coherent one after the quotes.) And I think that is exactly what happened to the LA Times critic a couple lines above. She sees the lack of ironic distance and wants her ironical borders restored immediately to not have to look too closely at something that intends to produce exactly this: a close emotional relationship with its audience. It is precisely not about irony, not about safe distance, not about making fun of everything. It is about emotion. And in the case of this critic, and a lot of others, I fear, about the misreading as being naive and sentimental.

*almost all DFW-related sources are found and taken from The Howling Fantods.

The cre(m)ation of Dave Eggers and Bret Easton Ellis

The little m devours everything in flames. Both are highly energetic processes and thus Dave Eggers seems to be burning on both ends in his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He uses the cremation of his parents to fuel his life and writing process, infused with their ashes. And what he does seems a pretty good waste of my time. I don't find this work heartbreaking at all but often emotionally true in it's plain and accurate descriptions of Eggers's cognitive processes. And there, what many seem to recognize as his genius, is the place where his meta-meta-reflections tell us about the feedback and repercussions between his heart and brain which are so good because everyone can easily relate to them. But it gets a bit tiresome after a while. The effect of his paranoid episodes - both with the worst and best outcomes -, while true and thus amusing and comforting, easily wears off after a couple of hundred pages and leaves little more than the stale aftertaste of show-offy writing techniques. But nevertheless this is a pretty good read.

Back to the ashes: Bret Easton Ellis did a similar thing with his own memoir, which is what I like to call Lunar Park. It is all about rising from the ashes of his father and creating his beautiful art out of the remains of this cremation. The next to last paragraph of Lunar Park is all about the ashes and how they form and seep into his life, his childhood memories, his anxieties, his desires, moods and, of course, his writing. The ashes going through the very pages of this book, creating new words and thus worlds and his life, which is, after all, a literary one.

I wonder if there's any other book or work of art that deals that explicitly with the process of its creation through the process of cremation of life. I mean literally. Because it's a nice and beautiful image that the ashes fall onto the white (or black) page and produce the letters which constitute its texture and meaning.