Okay, so I dissed Franzen. The shockwaves are being felt across left field.* After all, this is a very respected writer/ornithologist, who works hard at his craft and deserves recognition for his work. As do we all, with our variously desecrated basement ping pong tables.
What I have really done is set myself up to be wrong. How much more interesting to revisit preconceptions being smashed in real time, as the subatomic firing of brain cells occurs, rather than after the fact. ("I thought The Corrections would bite. It didn't.")**
I have said it before, the range of books I really enjoy is limited. So many authors I envision sitting in their pajamas, scratching a hairy chest or flabby tummy, writing in between firing social media missives.
I enjoy writing imbued with unique personal experience. Hemingway got that right. Twain. Hudson. Shakespeare. Melville in Typee (not Moby Dick, which I view as the progenitor of Pyncheon excess). Pynchon in Crying of Lot 49. Ryszard Kapuściński. Bolano.
The books I've enjoyed most the past 2-3 years were Rudyard Kipling's Kim and Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands. Literature at the cusp of modernity, a last gasp of air, with the written word still preeminent. No social media, not even a flickering Charlie Chaplin*** to cheapen the mystery of deeply felt and fervently expressed experience.
Meanwhile, Cowachunga 3.4 - Transmission is being forged from molten entrails, in the real-time mind workshop. Should be out by mornight. A taste of the first paragraph:
Kyle took the lead as the trail opened into a ravine that broadened into the flatness of the dirt road and points outward. The Mustang was where they had parked it, covered in a fine layer of dust. Unearthing keys from backpack, Kyle popped open the trunk and arranged bags amid a scatter of clothes and a very hot bag of trail mix, chocolate oozing into clumps of peanuts and raisins. Dylan held back as if the hot spring, and the wild women he had encountered, held some ineluctable pull. Kyle cracked open the driver’s side door, releasing a vapor-lock of heat––the pungency of sun-baked leather creating a reasonable facsimile of sneakers in the oven. Into the fiery furnace, seat branding his skin through t-shirt, “Shit goddamn!”
EnduranceWriter is Damon D. Dawson of Bandito College, aka flabby-chested (SEO Alert) Endurance Writer.
* I also dissed David Foster Wallace, sight unseen. Though I wrote an early EnduranceWriter post on the late night Greyhound to Vegas, in homage of sorts.
** A nice example of this, on the topic of Haruki Murakami.
*** With a rekindled interest in slapstick as an art form via The Party (see Boracay Buzzkill), I have devoured The Great Dictator and City Lights in recent nights.
What I have really done is set myself up to be wrong. How much more interesting to revisit preconceptions being smashed in real time, as the subatomic firing of brain cells occurs, rather than after the fact. ("I thought The Corrections would bite. It didn't.")**
I have said it before, the range of books I really enjoy is limited. So many authors I envision sitting in their pajamas, scratching a hairy chest or flabby tummy, writing in between firing social media missives.
I enjoy writing imbued with unique personal experience. Hemingway got that right. Twain. Hudson. Shakespeare. Melville in Typee (not Moby Dick, which I view as the progenitor of Pyncheon excess). Pynchon in Crying of Lot 49. Ryszard Kapuściński. Bolano.
The books I've enjoyed most the past 2-3 years were Rudyard Kipling's Kim and Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands. Literature at the cusp of modernity, a last gasp of air, with the written word still preeminent. No social media, not even a flickering Charlie Chaplin*** to cheapen the mystery of deeply felt and fervently expressed experience.
Meanwhile, Cowachunga 3.4 - Transmission is being forged from molten entrails, in the real-time mind workshop. Should be out by mornight. A taste of the first paragraph:
Kyle took the lead as the trail opened into a ravine that broadened into the flatness of the dirt road and points outward. The Mustang was where they had parked it, covered in a fine layer of dust. Unearthing keys from backpack, Kyle popped open the trunk and arranged bags amid a scatter of clothes and a very hot bag of trail mix, chocolate oozing into clumps of peanuts and raisins. Dylan held back as if the hot spring, and the wild women he had encountered, held some ineluctable pull. Kyle cracked open the driver’s side door, releasing a vapor-lock of heat––the pungency of sun-baked leather creating a reasonable facsimile of sneakers in the oven. Into the fiery furnace, seat branding his skin through t-shirt, “Shit goddamn!”
EnduranceWriter is Damon D. Dawson of Bandito College, aka flabby-chested (SEO Alert) Endurance Writer.
* I also dissed David Foster Wallace, sight unseen. Though I wrote an early EnduranceWriter post on the late night Greyhound to Vegas, in homage of sorts.
** A nice example of this, on the topic of Haruki Murakami.
*** With a rekindled interest in slapstick as an art form via The Party (see Boracay Buzzkill), I have devoured The Great Dictator and City Lights in recent nights.
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