Fear of Fiction

Once upon a time, a theoretically inclined graduate student at USC remarked that she had “gone beyond fiction.” Hardheaded gentlemen restrict their reading to biographies and history. Gio and Mike burn through fiction like a Los Angeles wildfire. In my desultory way I move through both fiction and nonfiction; yet with fiction I often find myself impatient with passages of description and realist trappings. My question for our little group is “What accounts for the renunciation of fiction by those who feel they’ve moved “beyond” stories and by those who find that they “learn” nothing from works without roots in facts?”  I have always been fascinated by this question but it became pressing after hearing a brief interview with DeLillo who said that he felt a writerly demand to do Falling Man , implying that fiction necessarily brings something to the event unobtainable elsewhere. what accounts for the antagonism….who wins?

Real-Life Other Texts

 

 

I spend a lot of time in the basement—out of necessity for online work and out of a desire for cool solitude where I indulge my various cultural obsessions in my half-assed way. Because I am an obsessive completist/listmaker, I often stand paralyzed before immersion into the texts that compel me. Nevertheless I find the time flying by as I contemplate things which seem rooted in my basement life and difficult to “share” as public objects. But here is the start of explaining things that have recently caught my attention, bringing me to spare many hours on fleeting sounds and images:

 

Emusic:  I cannot get over the fact that I can make CD’s and DVD’s on my computer. This seems like a miracle, having grown up with the hard reality of vinyl and still pissed off on the way CD’s skimp on liner notes and images. Then I discover…get this…that I can download fucking music off the internet….so I subscribe to emusic.com, a site devoted to independent music, and suddenly I become obsessed with playlists, sequences, and music networks (one song leading to another artist and then to another song). I have downloaded the Tindersticks, Howlin’ Wolf,a collection called American Primitives: Raw Pre-War Gospel, and the Mekons (the band closest to my heart probably—I identify easily with their romantically tinged cynicism and hybrid status between the anger of punk rock and the detached resignation of old country) So the Mekons leads me to Jon Langford’s “alt-country” band the great Waco Brothers and to Sally Timms solo records and to the compilations put out by Bloodshot Records and to the Handsome Family, a husband and wife duo who love country darkness and the irony of not taking serious themes ironically.  So I sit at the computer night after goddamn night, waiting for songs to download on my slow connection, then I compile them on itunes into playlists packed with personal secret meaning, then I burn them onto CD’s which I lovingly label and put into piles volatile with stored sound, demanding to be heard.  Soon all this music may overwhelm me, especially as I connect it with my own little private basement world. I saw a live performance of George Jones recently and I could not believe I was out in public seeing a real live human being performing music. How do I negotiate between old legendary George out there on the stage and my secret friends on emusic who do not get me a job, do not put me on the road to a happy marriage, do not help me finance the mortgage on a house or, in fact, in any way clarify the future?  I ask you, what is more real, the lovesick country girl who hangs herself in the song “The Butcher Boy” or the job announcement that proclaims I must be comfortable with spreadsheets and databases? I have a fantasy where Howlin’ Wolf throws Dean So-and-So to the floor in the midst of the raucous fish fry/wang dang doodle in Abyssinia Ned’s juke joint.

Best of

For purposes of a class I’m putting together, I ask for the following nominations:

 1. Best story making a serious engaged use of popular culture:

 2. Best story concerning popular music:

 3. Best story about urban life: 

 4. Best story focusing on education:

 since I don’t read anything, I can’t come up with much. But I’d like something intelligent freshmen/sophomores can work with.

Real-Life Other Texts

Two nights ago on the George Nouri Coast-to-Coast radio show (formerly hosted by Art Bell), there was an interview with a medium who had done spiritual research by interviewing suicide bombers in the afterlife to find out if their expectations of heaven matched the reality. Most indicated disappointment; some are even trying from their perch in the hereafter to stop future suicide bombers.

I love this stuff. But is it merely goofy fun or does it plug into an unfortunate inclination in Americans toward the ridiculous occult?