Gland Prix

Like a wart, a life wart

scope

I make cracks during the viewing of movies (not within theaters, however) and I feel no regret in expressing my displeasure with any work produced by man or woman. I have opinions and will let them be known. There’s no harm in it. I have prickly taste, perhaps. If you ask my wife, she will say that I am a snob.

And I will say that my wife has had the great fortune of never encountering a genuine snob at their full wrathful and transformative power within their great meditating-grounds of the lecture hall or, alternatively, the sinister pleasure-chamber of the post-workshop tavern.

In fact, I feel that I am all too catholic in my appreciation of artworks diverse in style and content. I am a sucker for that which I encounter by chance. I permit ideas and books and films and images to take shelter in my mind. Some small quarter of my mind perhaps, but they are given a chance to spin around the room a bit. And I measure the dancer on the floor.

Granting time to the foreign, odd, repellant, dense, and dull has, over time, proven valuable, enriching and rewarding.

e.g.:

• I have a BS in Economics - which I came to after years of struggle and doubling in Art History and Creative Writing. Why such things are Capitalized, I don’t know. Most people can’t even understand the desire to study econ - I barely did, but found it tremendously beautiful.

• Photography – As a pretty adept draftsman and wielder of brushes throughout high school and college I was a fine art snob. I saw photography as some kind of sub-art, what you did if you had no chops but did possess artistic pretensions. How you’re great grandmother views Jazz. Now, I see myself as a photographer. Only through the expedience of buying a dSLR (to photograph dogs - see next point) about 6 years ago, and practicing with it, did I gain a love of the medium.

• Sloppy, stinky, noisy mutts. Despite growing up both in rural Virginia and then in a father-ruralized suburban Virginia I had only owned a dog and that, briefly and tragically. I did not want another one. They seemed demanding in every way. My wife was desperate for one. I relented. We have three now and I work with dogs as my day job.

• Dozens of authors, books, and films that seemed for diverse reasons wholly unappealing or just unwelcoming but became favorites: L’Avventura, Wallace Stevens, Edith Wharton, Aleister Crowley, Damien Hirst (ok, maybe not a favorite, this one), High and Low, Dario Argento.

This vein is tapped - it’s understood. Things grow on you.

But, there, over there, in the doorway is the shit I just can’t get an angle on. Stuff that seems, from afar, pretty fucking bad. But so mysterious and tightly wrapped that I can’t help thinking that there’s got to be something to it and maybe I just don’t get it. I’m not equipped.

This is not the stuff that’s somewhat popular and more or less revered but which I hold to be, at the very least, a waste of time and attention. That’s baseball and Jonathan Franzen (sorry Plumtree).

These works, these things, are not popular. They may have acclaim and outsider status. But they seem on first contact the product of mental illness or a different kind of life form.

I could speak of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist here, but I’m not – I’m talking about something almost the opposite. I think.

I’ve come across the work of Tao Lin and Zachary German.

If you are not familiar, a few links to start you off:

1. bookslut
2. NY Times
3. HTML Giant

OK, WTF?

Is the writing that you may have sampled comprehensible? To me it seems the product of a kind of passive-aggression that has attained new depths. Clinical depths. I feel like I want to open the phone lines for callers on this. I can’t find a way into appreciating what I’ve read of these two authors. I don’t want to let this stuff in the house.

I want to dismiss it as the product of hipsterism gone utterly flat, but I’m too curious and worried to do so. Can anyone decode this at all for me?

Otherwise, my conclusion is that these are two young guys who cannot write, but can substitute, somewhat convincingly, artifice of the merest type for sentences. And stories. Of course, I’ll read a little more, but I probably won’t finish.