proximoception | (no subject)

Sometimes things make you wonder. Truism. I meant to ask you if Bloom always sticks by his statements. Along these same lines. I can see why somebody might not like David Foster Wallace but there's a link from Wallace's Wikipedia entry that has a Bloom interview where he says Stephen King is like Cervantes compared to Wallace. I chuckled but also grew a little concerned.

He's changed his mind a few times - he's warmed up a bit about Larkin lately, for example.

But Wallace and some of his peers rebel pretty drastically against Bloom's literary generation. They write books that are supposed to look like trash by those standards. As Pynchon's would have to Faulkner, say. If there's value in Infinite Jest Bloom would be the last to see it.

I now hope Murakami wins just so someone asks Bloom about him.

Yes, that would be great. There's some inwardness in Infinite Jest that I think Bloom would like. Not sure what sample he based his remarks on.

I hate every page of his I've seen, but my objection isn't really aesthetic. He's just a type of person I detest. I'm not sure if I can think of another writer where that's true - I find some others annoying (Auden, Eliot, Hopkins), but nowhere near that annoying. Even Pound is kind of interesting as a person. Just one with a head full of garbage. But Wallace I hate even when I agree with him.

Can you say more? I'm very interested in this particular reaction to his work.

"Wounded narcissism," one of Bloom's favorite Freudianisms, often makes me think of Wallace. Narcissists are amusing to passersby because they're both transparent and fantastical - they buy their own bullshit, don't care about consistency. Wounded ones suspect they can't get away with assuming the importance of their every word, so there's always a leak they're trying to patch up. They have enough empathy to realize they're mockable, without having enough to not tiresomely engage in every conceivable tactic to avoid our possibly mocking them, to control every possible perspective on them so they can feel they're the prize child.

Wallace is the pinnacle because he even knows he's doing that, proudly builds self-lashings into his display. The effect is something like: admire how aware I am of everything that's wrong with me. Even worse, he knows he's supposed to be universalizing, as a writer, so he absorbs you into his self-castigation: here's what's wrong with both and all of us. I.e. admire how well I'm attacking you, and how I'm allowed to because I'm attacking me too. Which would be fine if he were right about the rest of us. But he's not. We're mostly not aggressive verbalizers fed by a constant rage that not everybody loves us.

At times he seems to even know THAT, and be mad about it. Even worse than an egregious, self-interested display is one that randomly falters in self-doubt. This most commonly manifests not as "pity me" talk but as a certain kind of humor attempt that reminds me of South Park: slanderous attacks on enemy positions / ways of being whose over-the-top violence is supposed to excuse the hate - since no one can mean what you just said you get to say it. Your very acting out proves you have a sense of humor.

It's quite possible that the perpetual mental motion created by the primal injury allows him to create staggeringly great works of art, or that on some level we're all like Wallace (though we sure as hell don't sound like it). I'll never know because he trips pretty much all my warning sensors from sentence 1.

This is even better than I hoped. The one thing I would disagree about -- the narrator in a lot of Wallace sounds exactly like many of the manic, college educated people of my age that I know. That voice says things sometimes exactly as I feel but better than I could say them. When I picked up Infinite Jest when the paperback came out in 1997 or whatever, I couldn't believe it. That has worn off as I have read more and grown up some. But I still hear the voice every day in people I encounter. Like the majority of people. Where we differ maybe because I agree with everything you wrote.

Come to think of it there were one or two Wallace-y people in most of my grad classes. Mostly dudes.

Maybe worse in the Northeastern elite schools, where the stiff competition terrifies you into projecting that you already know everything?

I try not to think what I was like at twenty. Probably pretty awful. But probably not in that particular way.

So, what´s wrong with Murakami? I´ve read one of his books (I forget the title, it simply didn´t stick to my mind) and was not impressed. From what little I´ve heard about 1Q84 it´s nothing but an Eastern soap-opera, "Kill Bill" made in Japan. But, if someone like Jelinek ("Here come the toilets" as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Reich-Ranicki exclaimed when she was bestowed with Prizzi´s Honour made in Sweden) can go to the golden hall ball in Stadshuset, that´s no reason not to give Murakami the same opportunity. He might meet someone interesting.

Since one single effort is enough to catapult someone into the Nobel Prize position (you can play the Lord of Flies game here http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ but not here http://www.greatbooksguide.com/altnobel08.html) I´d have proposed someone like Andrzej Szczypiorski based simply on his Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman because I like it but he has gone and died beforehand, though a posthumous prize might be nice (can´t recall if it´s been done).
Generally,
the Swedish Academy has dubious taste not only in literature but also in restaurants. The one in the Old Town of Stockholm they use to meet in regularly is widely overrated http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_Gyldene_Freden, they will sell you ikean meatballs for the price (sic) of a ***daube. Therefore, maybe the restaurant should go for a prize in one of these cathegories: http://www.improbable.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig2005
It used to once upon a time be a nice and unpretentious pub-like bar to have lousy Swedish beer with friends in in my long gone youth but has since deteriorated into becoming a tourist trap. Perhaps it follows that way: Murakami gets the prize to get people to go to Japan. Bad taste = tough luck, like? http://www.svenskaakademien.se/en/news/press_releases/2013

Edited 2013-10-11 09:53 (UTC)

Yeah, it's the "on the strength of" part that's the trouble. 1Q84 isn't his typical book - he decided to proceed completely on is-inspiration, refused to rewrite, refused editing or had a completely cowed editor. There's aspects of Kafka on the Shore that gesture at this level of badness, but no other hints in his other books that this could ever have happened.

I hate Kill Bill but it's novelization would be light years better than 1Q84.

Wind Up Bird Chronicle has some really good stuff in it, Norwegian Wood is a fun pop novel. I'm neither a Murakami lover nor hater. But 1Q84 needs to be famous for its astonishing terribleness. That the opposite is true genuinely frightens and confuses me.

Geez, you almost make me want to read more Murakami! Lots of transport space, though (as I remember it) but look who´s talking: "Kill Bill" had it´s five minutes of fun (though I hate being addressed that way just because I happen to be a femelle of the species and host estrogen) but it was the other five hours or so that got at me and I was in good company at my fav. crazy neighbour´s, drinking Osborne while husband was at work; time was on my bloody hands. So, when I pick up a Murakami sometime between now and World´s End, it won´t be 1Q84 and it´s your fault, too.

Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.