A quick update to last week’s comment on Dale Peck’s cranky outburst occasioned by his review of Rick Moody’s The Black Veil.  Bill has continued the discussion on his site, usefully reminding us of B.R. Myers’ similar Summer 2001 screed published in the Atlantic, and directing us to Jonathan Yardley’s rather dull attempt at same.

Today, Salon gets into the action, with a Heather Caldwell article exploring a number of writers’ responses to the Peck piece and considering what makes for good literary criticism.

Sadly, we are nowhere mentioned.

Happily, the article includes the following quote, from a critic who “trounced Moody’s memoir in another publication” but who feels that the wholesale absence of credit given to the merits of such fiction render Peck’s critique meaningless:

“You have to reserve some language for Sept. 11, Adolf Hitler or, if you’re discussing art, Albert Speer,” says [Andrew] Solomon. “There can be a crisis in literature that warrants this urgency, but this isn’t it. Turning such frantic invective on writing that even in Peck’s view is nothing worse than banal and self-important is extremely irresponsible. I think Peck’s review tends to make literary discourse laughable rather than powerful, ridiculous rather than urgent.”

One salient question raised by this article is what Peck does like about literature, and why he feels he must so passionately defend it—a seemingly vital issue to which his anger permits him to give no time.  The beauty of the screed is its use of the attack in the service of a higher value; here, there is no higher value espoused.  Is Peck then guilty of a variant on the vacuity of which he accuses Moody, Eugenides, et al?  Does that emptiness, as the Salon article hints, reveal the hidden motives of professional jealousy and infighting?

Okay, I’m not really depressed so much as crushed under the weight of the belongings I’ve got to get sorted out and into boxes in the next 24 hours.  I’d hoped that, returning from NOLA to SoCal, the long division of my stuff would end.  My last move, a year ago, was a sorting into three piles:  this stuff goes into storage in Friend A’s extra room; this stuff goes into Friend B’s apartment, where he’ll make use of it for the year; this stuff goes to New Orleans, where I’ll need it.  Complex enough, and one would think that this return would be a coalescence, a gathering together of this dispersed flotsam into one centralized pile of flotsam.  Particularly given that I am moving into the apartment that Friend B just vacated, and thus 1/3 of my stuff is already there.

Except that the building that said apartment is in is not inhabitable, as it’s in the midst of a construction zone.  So I’m going to be housesitting for Friend A for the month of August.  So I’ll have access to the A stuff, but no access to the B stuff.

The problem is the NOLA stuff, which is being moved directly into the B apartment, where I will then lose access to it for a few weeks.  So I’m having to sort the NOLA stuff into the absolutely crucial, which comes with me in the car (cats; cat supplies; a subset of clothing; other personal items); the crucial, but not for the next week, which will be shipped to the A apartment (computer, printer, a few books); and the rest, which will disappear into the moving truck and apartment B.

Needless to say, the calculus of this move has absorbed all of my available brain space, and is looking to rent out more.  So I’m off to pack, and may be out of touch for a bit.  I’ll leave you with one brief thought:

Perdition?  Where the hell is that?

Should a reviewer of contemporary fiction actually be required to, say, like contemporary fiction?

The question is raised for me by Dale Peck’s review of Rick Moody’s The Black Veil, steered my way by faithful reader BT.  The review is not so much a review as a skewering, and not so much a skewering as an explosion of bile and vitriol.  From the very first line:

Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.

And a bit further on:

When I finished The Black Veil I scrawled “Lies! Lies! All lies!” on the cover and considered my job done.

If, however, the strongest conclusion that I drew from this review was that Dale Peck really, really, really doesn’t like Rick Moody, I’d say hey, to each his own, whatever.  I read The Ice Storm (granted, after having seen the movie), and enjoyed and appreciated much about it—for instance, I did not find the novel, as Peck does, to have “a troubling fascination with adolescent sexual organs” so much as a concern with the ways that adolescents’ preoccupation with their own sexual organs is driven by the simultaneously prurient and passionless obsessions of the grownups who are ostensibly raising them—but that’s a matter of interpretation and taste.  Peck doesn’t like Moody.  Whatever.

But then there’s this, when Peck attempts to figure out how American literary culture can have gone so wrong as to lionize such a pathetic figure as Moody:

In my view, the wrong turn starts around the time Stephen Dedalus goes to college in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and echoes all the way through Don DeLillo’s ponderously self-important rendering of Bobby Thompson’s shot heard round the world in the opening chapter of Underworld.

In fact, the article, by its conclusion, comes to damn contemporary writers by association the entire lineage of twentieth-century fiction dating back to Joyce:

All I’m suggesting is that these writers (and their editors) see themselves as the heirs to a bankrupt tradition. A tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is Ulysses; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov; and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon’s; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid—just plain stupid—tomes of DeLillo.

Peck’s not wholly off base, I think, in his assessment of postmodernism as a “white man’s ivory tower,” or in his suggestion that the dominance of this select group of writers has skewed the contemporary high-literary scene toward sterile experimentation devoid of affect and compassion.  But one nonetheless wonders how useful this kind of judgment is in a piece that arguably supposed to tell whether to buy Moody’s latest or not.

So again, the question:  should a reviewer of contemporary fiction actually be required to like contemporary fiction?

Mail is taking a while to catch up with me these days, given that it’s got to go through the postal service, campus mail, my department, campus mail, and the postal service again before it gets to me.  So needless to say, I’m a little behind on some things.  But I last week received this letter, which was apparently sent to all members of the MLA.

Having just completed (yay!) a first full-length scholarly manuscript (known in various stages of its composition as My Stupid Book, and at others demarked by other adjectives), I’m uncertain whether to be relieved by the import of this letter—whew!  perhaps this manuscript getting accepted or not won’t be the turn of fate that drives my tenure decision—or deeply chilled.  Have I spent the last six years on a project that will never see print?

When I’m able to escape my own self-involvement, however, I can see that there are some deeper issues to be pondered here.  Is academic publishing obsolete?  Aside from those of us still trying to get tenure, will anyone miss it if it is?  And if it’s not, how can it escape the fiscal crisis in which it’s mired?  Certain refereed journals on the web have begun to make inroads into that avenue of academic publishing, such that having an article in Postmodern Culture, say, has the something of the same clout as having an article in Representations would.  Can the same be done for the monograph?  Will anyone stand—er, sit—for reading a monograph on the web?  Or is the scholarly monograph all but dead?

Um, hi.  I’m trying to get an estimate on a small move.

– Where from?

– New Orleans.

– And to?

– Southern California.

– How small a move?

– I’m in a small one-bedroom, but it’s really sparsely furnished.  So not much stuff at all.  Like I’m not even taking my bed, right.

– So…

– I’ve used some online inventories and they estimate that my stuff would come in at around 1500 pounds.

– Let’s say 1700, to be safe.

– Okay…

– So, if that’s 1700 pounds… and roughly 1800 miles… let’s say 1850 to be safe… and if we add the origin… [inaudible mumbling, backed up by the sound of an adding machine]… and destination… and [inaudible, followed by much production from the adding machine]… it comes to right about $1700.

– Okay, 1700.  That’s based on the weight, right?  So what if my stuff actually weighs more, or less?

– Oh.  No.  This is a binding estimate.

– Based on…?  I mean, you haven’t seen my stuff.

– Yeah, but I’m giving you the TPG rate.  I could give you the 400N, sure, and then we could deal with the actual weight, but then I wouldn’t really be free to discount the price.

– Mm-hm.  And in terms of insurance…?

– The price includes a valuation of 70 cents per pound per article.  You can buy more if you want more, up to $2.50 per pound per article.  Or you can get replacement coverage, up to $10,000, for $264 for no deductible, or $60 for a $500 deductible.

– And what are your windows like for pickup and dropoff?

– We’ve got a three-day pickup spread.  And then there’s a five-day transit time.  So counting the actual day of pickup as day 1, the dropoff window begins on day 6 and extends to day 18.

– Uh-huh.  Great.  That’s what I needed to know.

– Call us back when you’re ready to get this started.

I spent a chunk of this past weekend hanging out in my apartment, not wanting to think about either the quantity of work I have to do in the next two weeks or the fact that somehow all of my belongings in this apartment need to transport themselves back to California at the end of that same two week period.  When I don’t want to think about the things directly in front of me, where else should I turn but the magic of digital cable.

I finally managed to catch Sofia Coppola’s rendition of The Virgin Suicides, based on the Jeffrey Eugenides novel, which I haven’t read.  (Eugenides, incidentally, is numbered among the “New White Guys,” a putative “group” of writers that includes David Foster Wallace, Rick Moody, Donald Antrim, and Jonathan Franzen.  I’m suspicious of this groupness, however; DFW was quoted in a Time article [which I can’t link for you as our good friends at AOL-Time Warner charge for access to their archives] as dismissing the idea by saying “Well, we’re all white males between 30 and 40, at least as far as I know.” None of this is particularly to the point of this entry; I’ve been looking into it for the famous conclusion and I just found it interesting.) The film is odd:  oddly paced, oddly structured, eerie in its prettiness.

But the main events of the weekend were the pay-per-viewings of The Others and Vanilla Sky.  And, for benefit of those who haven’t seen them, I’m just going to say Hmmm… on the correspondences.  Very intriguing.  Very revealing.  If you’ve seen them both, follow me into the comments—I’m dying to talk about them.  If not, well, hurry up and watch them so we can chat.

Well, I managed to conclude the conclusion in a temporarily satisfactory way, despite the deafening roar of absolute silence on your end.  Okay, point taken.  I’ll do my own work.  Sigh.

Having done so, and not being quite ready to begin the introduction last night, I instead took some time to poke around this web thing a bit, and stumbled upon a reader review of David Foster Wallace’s Up, Simba! that just tickled me to no end.  Go read it.  It’s the first review.

Oh, heck, I’ll even give you the part that tickled me:

He teaches at Disneyland, is what I last heard, which may be why I likened his genius to the size of one of those parks.

I’ve decided that it is in the vital interest of the academy’s future to take over the spaces of defunct amusement parks.  Classes could be tailored to their environs:  poststructuralist theory to be taught on the rollercoaster; the first half of the American lit survey on the log ride; senior seminars in the spinning teacups.  And, of course, all creative writing classes will be held in the funhouse.

So, I’m nearing the conclusion of the conclusion of the book I’ve been working on for the last umpteen years.  Which of course doesn’t mean I’m done—there’s still the introduction to be written, and the first chapter to be polished up a bit.

But it does mean that this is the moment at which I’m supposed to be thinking the really Big Thoughts, the what-does-it-all-mean thoughts, the concluding-type thoughts.  And I’m totally mired in the shallows, unable to come up with an adequate reason why the argument I’ve spent the last 260 pages making is so bloody important that the future of civilization depends on it.

My argument, in case you’re interested:  despite the perpetual hue and cry to the contrary (in which an article every six months or so proclaims the novel a dead form, and the novel itself repeatedly contemplates that death between its own covers), the novel is in fact not obsolete, but rather uses the notion of its obsolescence as a means of creating a kind of cultural wildlife preserve, a protected space within which it can continue to flourish.  But the question, to be wrestled with here in the last pages, is the relationship of these claims of the novel’s obsolescence to more general cultural cycles of the birth and death of genres, of styles, and of media.

So let me ask what you think:  why would it matter if the novel were obsolete?  Personally, I’d be crushed if no more of them were made, don’t get me wrong.  But is there some particular reason that the novel’s potential obsolescence should trouble us more than, say, the death of the vinyl LP?  Or the death of radio drama?  Or the death of epic poetry?  Is there something special about the novel—not necessarily something that makes it more valuable, but something that makes its (supposed) passing different from that of other cultural forms of expression?

(Any helpful thoughts would be much appreciated, and duly acknowledged.)

Tomorrow is the twentieth anniversary of the crash of Pan Am 759, which fell victim to a wind shear during takeoff from New Orleans International, plowing into a nearby Kenner neighborhood, killing eight people on the ground and all 146 aboard.

I know this now because the top story in the Sunday Times-Picayune was a remembrance of the crash, with a focus on the changes that it effected both in the aviation industry and in the town. The aviation industry learned from this tragedy, investing heavily in research toward the development of advanced technologies for the detection of wind-shears and microbursts.  Kenner has had a more difficult, more emotional recovery; many people who live there still can’t talk about that day.

I was in high school in 1982, only 70 miles up the road in Baton Rouge, but the distance—both that between the crash and my perceptions of it, and between 1982 and now—is more significant than it is substantive.  Just a few days ago, driving past the airport, I remembered the crash, but in a hazy enough way that I wondered for a moment if I had it confused with some other crash in some other city, or even if I’d dreamed some part of the memory.

Sunday’s paper explains to me, though, the chill I get every time I drive past what is now Louis Armstrong International Airport.  One of the runways is visible from the interstate, and when planes land on that strip they pass over the cars below by a bare couple of hundred feet.  Chilling enough, particularly in these post-9/11 days.  But that bit of nervousness has always seemed to have some non-present origin, one that I could never, before yesterday, fully locate.

And the wonderful folks helping steer them that way:  Click To Add Title. Genuinely sublime.