J. Lethem on SF

The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction; a brief essay by Jonathan Lethem.

One particularly brilliant passage:

In a literary culture where Pynchon, DeLillo, Barthelme, Coover, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, and Steve Erickson are ascendant powers, isn't the division [between science fiction and literary fiction] meaningless?

But the literary traditions reinforcing that division are only part of the story. Among the factors arrayed against acceptance of SF as serious writing, none is more plain to outsiders than this: the books are so fucking ugly. Worse, they're all ugly in the same way, so you can't distinguish those meant for grown-ups from those meant for 12-year-olds. Sadly enough, that confusion is intentional . . .

Sing it, brother.

Anyone who's seen a Jonathan Lethem book on the shelf will recognize that he's been savvy enough to rescue his own books from the fucking ugly conventions of SF cover art. When will the rest of the industry wake up?

Deconstructing Wilco

The song "Heavy Metal Drummer" on Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has the following lyric, which, if you're moderately familiar with deconstruction, will just about make your head explode:

I miss the innocence I've known
playing Kiss covers
beautiful and stoned

The speaker's putative pre-fallen "innocence" reveals itself in the very same line as something that is "known". Just as the fruit of knowledge of good and evil (which led to the archetypal ex-Edenic Fall) itself grew in the Garden of Eden, the innocence of the speaker itself harbors the decidedly fallen (influence-polluted or "knowing") act of "playing Kiss covers". The artist's original voice of innocence is always already fallen, in the fully Derridean sense.

But the really striking thing about this passage is that the speaker's conception of innocence strikes us as completely banal. A century and a half ago, Wordsworth and the Romantics sought out their original voices in pristine nature, seeking a sublimity that transcended the merely human. In their own, arguably more complicated way, so did Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Of course, however majestic its artistic achievements, the project was doomed --- when we seek out transcendence, we are chasing an inevitably human idea (deconstruction does get that much right). As Wilde famously remarked, Wordsworth "found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there". But nevertheless the binary opposition between nature and artifice persisted as a powerful feature of consensus reality well into the twentieth century.

Denying (or deconstructing) that opposition once had a certain noteworthy frisson. Indeed, the pulsating ebb and flow of a character's illusory escape from (and reintroduction into) social constructions of identity is the engine that powers much great High Modernist fiction, from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Invisible Man.

No more. [*] The contemporary construction of innocence no longer even bothers to wear the fig leaf of freedom from a priori influence. Innocence is knowingness, so much so that we don't even find it remarkable when people conceive of youthful innocence in terms of playing Kiss covers.

(Unless, that is, you're a former English major who occasionally falls off the wagon of literary theory abstinence and compulsively overanalyzes some random pop cultural artifact.)

In any case, Wilco's album kicks ass. And no, I am not stoned (or beautiful).

[*] This is a placeholder to indicate the spot where, if I were a real journalist, I'd probably insert a formulaic Matrix reference to give my article more editor-pleasing topicality.

Updike Must Die

For over half a century, John Updike has been producing writing that's perhaps best described as the literary equivalent of masturbating into a silk handkerchief (required reading: David Foster Wallace's elegant takedown in the NY Observer). But is he satisfied? Does he have the decency to fade quietly now that his irrelevance has ripened to its full fruition? No. He must continue to offend by publishing a truly awful poem in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review; first stanza:

O brown star burning in the east,
elliptic orbits bring you close;
as close as this no eye has seen
since sixty thousand years ago

Gaaaaaaaah. In the past, Updike at least had the virtue of a good ear, but this takes my breath away. I knew people in high school who wrote better poetry than this. The clichéd portentousness of the astronomical trope, the lifeless doggerel of the latter three lines' iambic meter, the utterly flat, failed quasi-lyricism --- how does he get away with it? Somebody please kill me. Or him, rather.

Or, at least, given that the Sunday Book Review is one of the very few popular national forums that publishes poetry, please give any of the nation's legion of talented young poets a day in the sun, instead of stroking the trivial ego of this trivial, trivial man.

R. Puchalsky on W. Gibson

I sometimes read Usenet a bit on lazy afternoons; if you've spent any time on alt.books.iain-banks, you've probably run into Richard Puchalsky, who is probably among the most perceptive critics of Banks's work, and science fiction in general, that I've ever read. Alas, lit crit is not his day job, so all we've got are his scattered Usenet posts; but, e.g., his recent post on characters in William Gibson's fiction does nail the subject right on the head.