you said ya moms was pretty and young, but she's old as dirt and got hair on her tongue
x-man, you're a prophet.
I’d like to dedicate this bloggytation to Voice. Right at the outset, where a proper dedication goes. And, having done so, I’d best jump into Salinger straightaway, since my debt to him is twofold: the elegant pleasure of reading and rereading his characters, falling for them, taking pleasure in the deepening subtlety that reveals itself through the patterns of and pauses in-between words as well as the words themselves. Salinger made me want to write dialogue, which is to say, to write at all, first, and, to this day, in a more concrete, or at least verifiable, way than any other writer has. But I wrote about this in the Franny & Zooey annotation. Furthermore, I wrote about Seymour: An Introduction in my theory of mind & narrative critical paper, and commented at some length about how it is a formless mess of a narrative, almost entirely absent of coherent structure beyond the whims of Buddy, the house/cabinbound writer. Thus, the current state would seem to call for me commenting further on Salinger’s effect on the whole and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters specifically, talking at some length about why it’s my favorite novella (it’s about Seymour’s wedding, yet takes place almost entirely outside of and before and after it; given its short length, Roof Beam was the first piece to instruct me explicitly in the ways of anchoring character-driven action around a piece of prominent physical action; for this reason and many others, I love it dearly), or how it’s got a thick strain of wit running through it—a very particular, observational wit conveyed to us by the eye of Buddy, our narrator, as often as not by means of juxtaposition of things—and stack of old letters read in the bounds of a new, unfamiliar bathroom—or of people, as when he’s in a cab with two people he doesn’t know and who are very different from each other, in age, gender, inclination.
Wit, then, is the thing to talk about. The real thing. So now I’m changing my dedication. Sorry, Voice; now you must co-chair this bidness, because I’m extending a second an equally weighty dedication to Wit. and I don’t’ mean that in a professorial TRAGEDY + COMEDY kind of way, nor even a way that accords closely to the Twainian and/or Marxist equation of comedy = tragedy + time. For my purposes, and for our purposes right now, comedy = funny + interesting. I want to be interested in what makes me laugh. Within the realm of books, and it’s astonishing to me how rare funny is in anything that approximates a serious book. (Or, for that matter, a funny book; as discussed earlier, Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea by Chelsea Handler is funny but forced—and, as its thin memoirish/narrative thread exists as a framework for its wit, every lazy or even somewhat obvious joke takes twice the toll. Clever is why I was reading the book at all, and every failed attempt at clever had me muttering “24-freaking-95. Goddammit, I can’t even give this thing to anyone I want to think me smart.”) So, then, according to funny/wit-having books I’ve read this quarter, let’s start with Jonathan Ames, move to Roddy Doyle, and finish with Ben Greenman.
Jonathan Ames comes first because I wasn’t surprised by him. I mean I was, at first, but my initial encounters came by way of online essays and excerpts I read and marveled at, in terms of their lilting verbiage and extraordinarily self-doubting tone. Wake Up, Sir! is about a dude who has a butler, and lives in
Jeeves is always funny, though.
Roddy Doyle’s Oh, Play That Thing is set on this side of the water, in
A while back, Ben Greenman gave a radio interview on Wisconsin Public Radio that talked about the piece in his book Superbad entitled Blurbs. Greenman, a writer, Mcsweeneys contributor, editor at The New Yorker, makes up to my mind as tightly wound a rope as can be woven from the three strands of witty and insightful and obtuse. In the interview, he describes Blurbs—and it is, after all, exactly that: a collection of blurbs about a piece composed entirely of blurbs, which is to say, itself. That’s the whole bit. Greenman talks about how he wanted originally to make a book called Blurbs that was packed with blurbs on the back cover, and then have the pages glued shut. Ultimately, he said, he decided to not alienate a lifetime of readers in one fell swoop, so he went another way.
Superbad is another way. But, really, not by much; it constantly plays with form in such jolting ways that it preordained itself to the funny and aware and postirionic literary crowd, which is an invisibly thin slice of the overall crowd. If you’re working at home today and would like an accompanying visual, take a pencil, a blank piece of paper, and draw an empty circle on it, as well as a thin line representing the radius of the circle; then erase the line, and what’s left is the size of Superbad’s audience.
I’m hoping it’s too early for itself, like Arrested Development was. There’s a lot there—the content is so steeped in knowledge of form and narrative that, you know, he’s actually saying something in Blurbs. As one Mcsweeneys reviewer put it, Blurbs “reads like a Mobius strip tied around Jorge Luis Borges's finger.”
Greenman goes the places he does, with the primary formal/thematic thread being the libretto fragments from musicals interspersed throughout the book (Microsoft! The Musical, Elian! The Musical, The Death of the Musical! The Musical et. al). Let me tell you something: if we ever get to talking and I act like I know the first goddam thing about Jorge Luis Borges or his finger, I’m lying. My road back to any good regard for literary criticism been a long and winding one—with so much further still to go—and actually Mcsweeneys, who published Superbad, has been a main motor for me since I was made aware of its New Enthusiasmesque ethic (slogan: be more awesome). The point is that it doesn’t much matter that I’ve never said Jorge Luis Borges’ name aloud, that in my head I pronounce it Boorgeez. There’s so much there, all of it interesting and fun on its own merits—they’re recipes, in a manner of speaking. Detailed, brightly rendered recipes for linguistic, thematic, wit-tastic spelunking.
