What are you currently reading?

[epilogue]

But I'm a reformed long-winded creative type myself; I wrote lyrics just like Conner Oberst before I'd ever heard his music.

I'd argue you did not. But I haven't read any of your lyrics. So I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. But if no one else out there is doing it, writing on his level, then I have to believe there are few out there who aren't "famous" or "known" or whatever that are doing it. He's a pretty special talent.

[tragabigzanda]

Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

[Simple Torture]

The conversations on the past few pages have made me sprout a great big woody.

[epilogue]

The conversations on the past few pages have made me sprout a great big woody.

I'm about 100 pages in and I fucking LOVE Distant Star. This thing is fantastic. And it's really changing how I'm looking at and wanting to approach my third novel.

[The Argonaut]

I love Dave Eggers. AHWOSG was the first I read and it's great. Zeiroun was stupendous and made me cry. One section of his newest book, Heroes of the Frontier, made me really happy and made me laugh really hard while I was reading it one night before bed. I went back and read the last few pages over again it was so good. I could've read more, but I wanted to enjoy that moment so I turned off the light and laid down. I was thinking about that section, and all of a sudden found myself crying! Just like that. Such a weird experience. I think he's great

you sure do cry a lot

Maybe the feeling of tears twice a week? A good cry once a month? It's usually not sad-crying or panic-crying or stress-crying or anything. Just crying because something hits me in just the right emotional place. It always surprises me, and if I'm alone I'll lean right into it. It feels really good to cry a little.

[lennytheweedwhacker]

I love Dave Eggers. AHWOSG was the first I read and it's great. Zeiroun was stupendous and made me cry. One section of his newest book, Heroes of the Frontier, made me really happy and made me laugh really hard while I was reading it one night before bed. I went back and read the last few pages over again it was so good. I could've read more, but I wanted to enjoy that moment so I turned off the light and laid down. I was thinking about that section, and all of a sudden found myself crying! Just like that. Such a weird experience. I think he's great

you sure do cry a lot

Maybe the feeling of tears twice a week? A good cry once a month? It's usually not sad-crying or panic-crying or stress-crying or anything. Just crying because something hits me in just the right emotional place. It always surprises me, and if I'm alone I'll lean right into it. It feels really good to cry a little.

oh ok

[epilogue]

The conversations on the past few pages have made me sprout a great big woody.

Do you have a take on Eggers in general and Heartbreaking Work... specifically?

[tragabigzanda]

Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

[Simple Torture]

Oberest comes up a lot in discussions of the sincerity vs. irony divide--there's a passage in one of Franzen's books where one of his characters bemoans the fact that Oberest tries to hard to perform sincerity, and then acknowledges in his act that he's performing sincerity and has a sincere sense of regret over that performance. I don't line up exactly with Franzen, but it's a nice little distillation of the paradox of sincerity in the post-postmodern age: once you try to be sincere, then there's an element of performance and artifice and the game is up. I disagree with some of my colleagues who believe that sincerity takes off when a new generation of super-smart, highly-educated writers (like Wallace) recognize this paradox and are trying to find ways around it utilizing post-structuralist theories on ideas like "gift" and "charity," because I think this spills too much into the intentional fallacy and basically ignores the fact that the tension between sincerity and irony that they discuss goes back to at least the early 1980s and permeates every part of the culture; it's not like these authors suddenly got it, it's that their works are enriched by cultural conversations and controversies that were going on for years. Each author offers a new twist, but it's dangerous to say someone "started" up sincerity.

[lennytheweedwhacker]

do you like chabon, trag?

[Simple Torture]

The conversations on the past few pages have made me sprout a great big woody.

Do you have a take on Eggers in general and Heartbreaking Work... specifically?

It's been a couple of years since I've read Eggers and the only book I've gotten through is You Shall Know Our Velocity. I wrote about it during my comprehensive exams and actually, if I remember correctly, I wrote about it as a tragedy: an acting out of the myths of "American exceptionalism" or something like that. I thought it was pretty good in that regard. Maybe I'll try and grab a quote or two from my paper.

[tragabigzanda]

Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

[Simple Torture]

There's some stuff in here about the end of You Shall Know Our Velocity, so spoiler-tagged; I guess I still believe most of this, but I don't really write about this stuff anymore:

Spoiler: show

Both Haunted Houses and “No Grace on the Road” expose that thinking about American-ness as some sort of pure, exceptional nature has its limits, both due to the fact that American power constantly struggles against its impotence to exert influence everywhere and that there was more than likely never a “pure” American-ness to begin with. On the surface, the characters in Dave Eggers’ novel You Shall Know Our Velocity! appear to be making the same mistakes: the simplistic views they have of their roles as Americans put them in danger at times, and they admit that they could be doing more harm than good for the people they meet. However, by the end of the narrative, the book’s narrator has a sudden turnaround; he may not express it in these terms exactly, but his revelation can be read as a realization that identity is a process of encounters, not a stable substance.

The novel’s narrator, Will, suddenly comes into a large amount of money and enlists his best friend, Hand, to travel around the world with him to give it away. He has always had the urge to help people, “to engage them and fix things,” especially for people who are fighting to survive, but he has struggled with it due to an “inability, due to the imagined and impossible barrier between myself and these strangers with fumbling hands” (15). As a newly wealthy American, Will sees it as his duty to make the world a better place; but, as their trip faces obstacles and delays, he slowly comes to realize that he is not as exceptional or powerful as he originally believed. He laments: “Nothing we did ever resembled in any way what we'd envisioned. Maybe we couldn't help but make a mess everywhere we went” (226). Will has an inner voice that admonishes him for picking people to give the money to at random: “You do more harm than good by choosing recipients this way. It cannot be fair”; Will shoots back: “How ever is it fair?” (118); the voice goes on to charge that the real motivation behind Will’s trip is to feel and relish the control that the money provides. After a week, he and Hand feel like they have failed, and they go their separate ways. Will’s dejection is over the way that the qualities of the identity he thought he had—a young, energetic, philanthropic, formidable American—seemed to unravel over the course of his journey; he is in a similar head space as Emily in Haunted Houses and the narrator from “No Grace on the Road” are at the end of their tales, and all signs point to his leading the same sort of frustrated, directionless life as those two characters, but this is not the case.

Will’s story gets a pseudo-epilogue that relates one final trip: he travels to Mexico with his mother to attend a wedding. All of the failures of his recent travels are weighing on his mind, and it casts a sour mood over the festivities; that is, until the reception, where he lets loose and joins a group of revelers who jump into a pool half naked. Right before he does so, Will takes off his pants and shoes, both of which “still held currency from a cold and suspicious land” (400); this casting off of the money, which had shackled him to one specific belief in static American identity throughout the novel, is the first sign of the drastic change that occurs on the story’s last page. After his feet leave the pool deck, Will hangs in the air for what seems like forever—or, at least longer than he should have been suspended there. At the moment he hits the cold water, both his heart and apparently time just stop; he says: “Man, I thought that was the end, right there” (400); that is, he thought his life had come to an end. He lives (but only for two more months), but more importantly he has come to terms with the fact that identity is not stable and substance-like; rather, it is a moment-to-moment process of managing the expectations and realities of one’s existence. This never-ending activity is exhausting, perhaps, but Will proves that it is possible, even if he only does it for a short amount of time (the few passages in the book between this moment and his death seem to suggest that he continues to succeed). Such a process is opposed to attempts in the late-twentieth century to “return” American life (both cultural and political; both domestic and international) to a pure, originary form that never existed; although Will’s example is just one way to accomplish this and certainly would be difficult to replicate, it offers a way to navigate and handle collisions between different essentialist views of American identity that do not take the nuances of a constantly shifting, frequently elusive nature into account.

[epilogue]

I was never talking about sincerity when talking about Oberst. That's a very different discussion, I think. I was talking about his talent as a lyricist and his competence as a composure. In none of that is the discussion of sincerity. I'm happy to talk about that, but up to this point, it has not been part of what I'm saying.

[epilogue]

But in a broader sense... ST's post was outstanding.

[Simple Torture]

I was never talking about sincerity when talking about Oberst. That's a very different discussion, I think. I was talking about his talent as a lyricist and his competence as a composure. In none of that is the discussion of sincerity. I'm happy to talk about that, but up to this point, it has not been part of what I'm saying.

I just saw his name come up and remembered we had talked about sincerity a bit; my bad!

Honestly, I'm not that familiar with much of his work. Just a few songs here and there, like I was in a wedding where that one song of his was the first dance.

[epilogue]

I was never talking about sincerity when talking about Oberst. That's a very different discussion, I think. I was talking about his talent as a lyricist and his competence as a composure. In none of that is the discussion of sincerity. I'm happy to talk about that, but up to this point, it has not been part of what I'm saying.

I just saw his name come up and remembered we had talked about sincerity a bit; my bad!

Honestly, I'm not that familiar with much of his work. Just a few songs here and there, like I was in a wedding where that one song of his was the first dance.

We were all in that wedding.

This Oberst thing has extended over a couple different threads now. I think trag may have been heading in that direction in his take on Oberst but I was not. It all goes back to an earlier discussion in the OB forum. I appreciate what you're saying about Oberst -- moreso I appreciate the discussion about sincerity v irony. That is a great discussion. And I'm happy to have that conversation about Oberst, I just hadn't been having that conversation up to this point. Still, a totally valid talking point, though.

[tragabigzanda]

Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

[Simple Torture]

He's sort of an outlier in the discussions of music that I've come across, because for the most part people either talk about bands or entire scenes when discussing the new sincerity in music. And lots of discussions focus on big, big bands as well--groups like Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire--because there's a sense, I guess, that when a larger community comes together to create music, you're likely to get more perspectives and a fuller view of a subject, something that's not limited by a single songwriter's perspective. But then again, there were articles in the 1980s calling Tony Bennet a member of "the new sincerity," so there's only so far discussions like that can go.

[tragabigzanda]

Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.