Talking to myself. Part one: a disclaimer: I am not well read.

I think I’m not well-read. I think I have read in a haphazard fashion, opening the page where I find it, casting my eye on what is in front of me, with little attention to the great conversation of literature and the great adventure of adventure fiction. Just what I happen upon, seeking little out. So therefore I think I am .relatively unknowledgeable about the various kinds of reading that I do. Sometimes you see a confession like that and the person seems to be bragging, setting themselves aside from the supposed pretentiousness of fashionable readers or the supposed compulsivity of the academic or the completist. I want to say straight out that I am not bragging. The confession is what it purports to be, a confession of inadequacy to the task I’m about to set on here (probably not immediately).

The science fiction fans I correspond with tend to be much better read than I am. They tend to read books and books every week. Some are olympians of reading: they can devour several hundred page works in a day, and remember events and the names of the characters the next month when they want to discuss things. Now, some of these people read only science fiction (or only fantasy), or even only books of a certain type within the genre, but the really interesting ones also read at least some books in other genres, and the really really interesting ones have some level of expertise in other fields. I mean these people usually have something very interesting to say about what they read.

Lately – I mean in the last ten years or so – I have become very lazy. I think some of it arises from a stupid and timid response to certain disappointments. But I’m not in the business of making excuses at the moment. The thing is, that I’ve been reading a lot of what’s easy, which means easy to hand and convenient. I don’t apologize for what I’ve been reading. But I’m aware that I’ve missed a lot of good reading too, as well as missing a lot of good music, good movies, and wildly excellent wildflower hikes and stargazing expeditions. I mean to remedy some of that.

Okay, disclaimer done, what I’m doing here is introducing a couple-few thoughts I’ve been having about difficulty and pleasure in writing. No, I mean in reading. Now I’ll conclude this bit with a note about what inspired me to do this.

Actually I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Several years ago, I think, I had a few conversations about the fact that I don’t much like the various bumptious genres -- military science fiction, monster movies, the kind of fantasy which is sometimes unfairly called “extruded” and not only by its detractors, the kind of story in which a small band of individualists save the universe, car chase movies, things with a lot of explosions and projectiles and guns. It’s really hard to say you strongly don’t like something without sounding snobbish about it, and I know I failed because I pissed people off. And a mere statement of not liking something, honestly stated, shouldn’t do more than mildly annoy the people who do like it. But being apologetic about awkward conversations is not what kept me thinking about it. What kept me thinking about it was that there was at least an idea, of not a whole worldview about reading and writing, that was lying there not quite in the reach of my expression but which I wanted to grasp and dance around with.

So that’s what I’m doing here. You’re not going to find in these next entries a justification for liking or not liking what I like and don’t like to read and write. Not at all. For the purpose of this thing I’m doing here, it doesn’t matter what kind of story I like more than another. I kind of think what I’m going to be writing here, I could write even if my tastes in stories was as opposite as it is possible to imagine it being.

This is going to be really long so I'm doing it in sections.

Talking to myself. Part two:Iron Chef Battle: Realism.

Remember my disclaimer at the beginning of this series? I’m about to take note of an argument between two writers whose fiction I have not read, discussing mostly other fiction I have not read, who are discussing a genre I have read little of. Ben Marcus, author of The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women (which is a novel), has taken on Jonathen Franzen (author of The Corrections) in a discussion about what literary fiction ought to do (and by the way, who’s oppressing whom) in a long piece, “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life As We Know It: a correction,” which is listed as a “folio” in the October 2005 Harper’s Magazine (Vol 311, No.1865) . I don’t know what they mean by “folio,” unless that the piece is long enough to stand on its own like some nineteenth-century monograph. Another disclaimer: I haven’t found the original Franzen piece yet, and I’m hoping it doesn’t matter for my purposes. I’ve been reading interviews and snips of his to try to make up for it. I have nothing for or against Franzen or Marcus. There’s just these ideas I want to deal with.

Marcus starts out with a brief discussion of the parts of the brain involved in understanding reading. Honestly, I thought that part seemed a little garbley, but the important part is this: he says that the parts of the brain that are involved in reading comprehension are developed by reading, and it should be a writer’s desire, therefore, to have an audience which is practiced in reading and has their reading brain all nicely developed and strong.

According to Marcus, Franzen’s lately been writing pieces in which he says that “experimental” writers are turning off readers from literature and that this ultimately threatens serious publishing. He says Franzen says that certain modern writers are being too difficult for their audiences and turning them off so that they will tend to go off and read comic books or watch movies or something. And this is bad because you can’t be a reader if you do those things (okay, here I’m caricaturing what might have been a caricature of the original, so remember I’m not holding Marcus or Franzen responsible for any of these statements).

Marcus says that the people who say the things that Franzen says get to call themselves realists. He takes a sidetrip to explain that this is unfair because if you get to call yourself a realist, the other guys have to call themselves something in opposition to realism, which makes them sound weak in comparison. I just got off a month or two of trying to defend and define magic realism to a group of mostly spacecore science fiction fans (I think), and I can hardly ever find anybody else who likes socialist realism romantic adventure pulp writing, so it was a surprise to me to realize that there are contexts in which realism is the top dog connotive widget, whether or not those contexts are any broader than Marcus’s defense of somethingother than realism. The one person I ever heard saying anything about realism as an embattled genre – remember I’m sort of undereducated in contemporary literary genres and the arguments about them – was the wonderful writer Carter Wilson, my teacher at UCSC and one of the best friends a human being could ever have, and at the time he wasn’t so much dismissing other ways of writing as saying there was something valuable in this kind of writing and he was proud to do it. I mention this as a preliminary confusing tactic, because the next thing I want to say is that my stepmother, who is better read than I am, upon reading Carter’s magnificent Treasures on Earth, said that the book reminded her of William Burroughs, a puzzle I have returned to many times over the years because frankly Burroughs creeps me out and I don’t see the comparison. I assume it must be the intensity of sensual detail, or something, that makes the comparison. I can’t ask her right now because she’s getting ready to go to Africa again (everybody goes places but me).

I get the impression that realism in this context means stories wherein the narrative line is the organizing principle for the structure – right, but aren’t most stories written that way? – and in the structure is more or less conventional – that is, not “experimental” – and that there’s not that much more to the description. About this point in Marcus’s piece, he switches to a person named B.R. Myers who writes in the Atlantic Monthly, who asks for “a time-tested masterpiece or what critics patronizingly call a fun read – Sister Carrie or just plain Carrie.”

That’s pretty general to be fighting over. But they’re doing it all the time. I’m going to end this here, except for one thing: if these guys were science fiction writers instead of literary writers, they’d still have these discussions, but they’d be different. Later I’ll get to what that’s all about.

Next section is about this idea of Marcus’s: literary ambition. It's not necessarily what it sounds like.