The Rake Magazine

I like McSweeney's.

This may come as a surprise, because I don't wear tight jeans. And even though I have thick-framed glasses, it's because I'm near-legally-blind, so if I had puny little wire-frames the lenses would stick out like half an inch, and I'd be all self-conscious about it. You can call my tortoiseshell frames trendy, even pretentious, but the fact is I need them, and that they look so good on me is purely incidental, a symptom of my otherwise-already-fantastic features. (I've been led to believe, maybe because of the movie Juno, that McSweeney's readers are prone to tight denim and unnecessarily thick spectacle frames. Greasy hair and a moth-eaten scarf might round out the picture. A plaid wool skirt over the tight jeans, for the ladies. Hipsters, if you will. Dirty, dirty hipsters.)

I like Mcsweeney's. More so than my sartorial infractions, this may surprise you because I also like n + 1.

For the uninitiated, n +1 is a powerful little literary/sociological journal printed twice yearly, updated online frequently. Occasionally its editors will get some attention for, among other things, doing a little bash work on McSwy's.

The latest barb came in last Sunday's New York Times, in an article about Keith Gessen, whose book All the Sad Young Literary Men just came out. It was a paraphrase, and only half a sentence long, but biting nonetheless:

"As a founding editor of n +1... Mr. Gessen and his colleagues have assailed other publications they believe have squandered their eminence, or never merited it (McSweeney's and anything else associated with the writer Dave Eggers)."

Here is a bit of extrapolation, taken from an interview Keith Gessen did with the New York Inquirer:

"When [n +1] launched, it seemed like [McSwy's] were the ideal representatives of a certain kind of literary position, which states that 1) reading, in any form, is good, that writing is good, that literature is good; 2) all these things are imperiled, and therefore 3) that anything done in the service of these things is good. We disagree with all three parts of that, even #2. And we've said so a number of times."

And finally, an excerpt from the piece that started it all, from a July 2004 post in n + 1.

"As far as content goes, though, the innovation of the Eggersards [followers of Dave Eggers] was their creation of a regressive avant-garde. The first regression was ethical. Eggersards returned to the claims of childhood. Transcendence would not figure in their thought. Intellect did not interest them, but kids did. Childhood is still their leitmotif.
... Eggers's subject reflected the Eggersards' obsession with childhood as a way of life. From raising a child as the treasure house of one's own moral genius (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), to the editorship of anthologies for teens (Best American Nonrequired Reading), to a writing-tutor program (826 Valencia) — this is the substitute for transcendence in the Eggersard world."

I'm not sure I'm smart enough to dismantle everything above...

But here goes:

Attacking the first attack — that McSwy's doesn't deserve literary merit — I'm just going to list some of their contributors:

Denis Johnson
Joyce Carol Oates
Nathan Englander
TC Boyle
Ann Beattie
Chris Adrian
Michael Chabon
Javier Marias
Sarah Vowell
David Foster Wallace
(And more!)

There are a couple  of Pulitzers in there, among other awards. Not that prizes automatically entail merit, but there are legitimate critics out there who will argue on behalf of everyone on that list. (And I will too.)

I think the worst you can say is that at times McSwy's seems more concerned with form than with content. Some of the story structures are a little too cute, but really you get that with any lit mag.

Second:

Gessen's arguments from the Inquirer interview appear to make a lot of assumptions about McSwy's intentions. I'm looking for a mission statement on the McSwy's website, but can't find one. All I know is that the 826 programs, which are set up to tutor English and writing to under-funded and inner-city youth, are good. One might attack 826 on philosophical and psychological terms, but at the end of the day, it's a damn good organization doing damn good things.

Finally:

At root, it seems n + 1 is arguing that the McSwy's crew is not serious enough about their writing, because they look to their childhoods for substance and content instead of culling meaning from the world we live in presently.

Gessen and others are assertive, and even persuasive. I, too, believe that the best literature out there is more expansive than a fictionalized memoir — the characters of Tolstoy and Fitzgerald and Flaubert are all products of the societies they inhabit; their novels aren't about personal stories, but about whole cultures.

But, sentimental as it may be, to say that A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius didn't get inside of the Generation X-Y culture is, I think, a bit shortsighted. "Eggers' subject reflected the Eggersards' obsession with childhood as a way of life" — I think Gessen is making the Eggersards a bit too niche.

I would argue that, to an extent, everyone these days has an obsession with childhood as a way of life. Which would therefore bring AHWOSG into the realm of ‘serious' literature, indicative of the larger world. Just like every reviewer said it was when it came out eight years ago.

On a personal level, for whatever reason — for various reasons — probably a dozen of my friends' parents have gotten divorced in the last five years. And with each break-up, it really seems sometimes, from my unsophisticated vantage point, that upon divorce some adults immediately revert to their childhood selves. One friend's mom moved to New York and began dating twenty-four-year-olds (after a twenty-eight-year-long marriage). One friend's dad has started going regularly to eighteen-plus shows at First Ave, and frequenting the college bars he went to as a student at the U. Really I could give a thousand examples, but what they all indicate is a societal obsession with childhood. I'm not going to get into the media's infatuation with youth culture and all that, but it's there.

Eggers' novel is a personal story, but his own character is a function of his encapsulating society.

Benjamin Kunkel, another founding editor of n + 1, published his first novel a couple years ago — Indecision. Its protagonist, the delightful Dwight Wilmerding, isn't very different from Dave Eggers' character in AHWOSG. Wilmerding is petty, childish, and irresponsible. Maybe the only difference from Eggers is his belief in transcendence, his belief that he's better than his circumstances — but when he actually tries to escape his life, that's when the book is at its least convincing, even bordering on manifesto.

A medley:

How about some Important books based on loose childhood biography? Death in the Family, by James Agee; Call it Sleep, by Henry Roth; The Catcher in the Rye; Swann's Way; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Am I missing something here? I must be missing something here. I'm not saying Eggers is on the level of Proust or Joyce, but if they're allowed to examine their childhoods, why can't Mr. Eggers? Is it a matter of intellectual analysis? Of storytelling?

If nothing else, Eggers and his pals are making literature enjoyable for the non-reader. One can pick up an issue of McSweeney's and not have to have read hundreds of other books to catch the references therein. n + 1 has some ambitious goals for its fiction, but the fact is they need publications like McSwy's just to establish some ground-level interest in reading, to make n + 1 accessible — possibly even relevant — at all.

Squash the beef!

A half-post:

In this morning's Star Tribune, Nick Coleman writes about two high school students from Chaska who just set off to reenact Eric Sevareid's epic canoe trip from the Minnesota River to Hudson Bay, recounted in Sevareid's book Canoeing With the Cree.

As much as we might learn about chasing dreams and fulfilling goals and living vicariously from a couple eighteen-year-olds, I thought it apt to mention Jon Lurie's heartfelt account of the same trip, which he undertook with a nineteen-year-old delinquent who'd been mixed up with a sawed-off shotgun and had to lay low for the summer. It appeared in the July 2007 issue of The Rake.

Employing a tactic I'm pretty sure I've picked up from the current presidential administration, I've decided to take a new approach to truth. Namely, I'm going to make it up. And make it up in such a way that justifies every decision I decide(d), and in such a way that makes me feel better about my life, and the enveloping society thereof.

So here goes: Everyone is reading.

And because everyone is reading, there is a high demand for poetry.
And because there is a high demand for poetry, once a week, possibly on Mondays, but certainly not limited to Mondays, I'm going to try really hard to post a Poem Worth Reading on this blog.

I know I know I know, this is supposed to be a blog about books, and probably shouldn't contain any actual literature, unless it's hyper-linked. Nevertheless, poems are great. They're (often) short, and powerful, and sometimes they even rhyme, which makes you feel happy for reasons you probably can't define very well. And people should read more of them. More, even, than they already are. Which is lots. Because everybody is reading. Obviously.

This week's Poem Worth Reading is by Allen Ginsberg, from his collection Kaddish and Other Poems, which came out sometime ago (1961).

Read it. Everyone else is. There's self-deprecation involved. And cats. God, it's honest-seeming. Parts are omitted. If you want them in, let me know and I'll add them. A little dark, but it's cold outside.

"Mescaline"

Rotting Ginsberg, I stared in the mirror naked today
I noticed the old skull, I'm getting balder
my pate gleams in the kitchen light under thin hair
like the skull of some monk in old catacombs lighted by a guard with flashlight
followed by a mob of tourists
so there is death
my kitten mews, and looks into the closet
Boito sings on the phonograph tonight his ancient song of
angels
Beato Angelico's universe
The cat's gone mad and scraowls around the floor
...
Yes, I should be good, I should get married
find out what it's all about
but I can't stand these women all over me
smell of Naomi
erk, I'm stuck with this familiar rotting ginsberg
can't stand boys even anymore
can't stand
can't stand
and who wants to get fucked up the ass, really/
Immense seas passing over
the flow of time
and who wants to be famous and sign autographs like a movie star

I want to know
I want I want ridiculous to know to know WHAT rotting ginsberg
I want to know what happens after I rot
because I'm already rotting
my hair's falling out I've got a belly I'm sick of sex
my ass drags in the universe I know too much
and not enough
I want to know what happens after I die
well I'll find out soon enough
do I really need to know now?
is that any use at all use use use
death death death death death
god god god god god god god the Lone Ranger
the rhythm of the typewriter

What can I do to Heavy by pounding on Typewriter
I'm stuck change the record Gregory ah excellent he's doing just that
and I am too conscious of a million ears
at present creepy ears, making commerce
too many pictures in the newspapers
faded yellowed press clippings
I'm going away from the poem to be a drak contemplative

trash of the mind
trash of the world
man is half trash
all trash in the grave

What can Williams be thinking in Paterson, death so much on him
so soon so soon
Williams, what is death?
Do you fact the great question now each moment
or do you forget at breakfast looking at your old ugly love in the face
are you prepared to be reborn
to give release to this world to enter a heaven
or give release, give release
and all be done - and see a lifetime -all eternity - gone over
into naught, a trick question proposed by the moon to the answerless earth
No Glory for man! No Glory for Man! No glory for me! No me!

No point writing when the spirit doth not lead

NY, 1959

This week is Passover. Christians everywhere are saying, "Great, I love Passover! Matzoh's so fun!" Meanwhile Jews lament eight days of indigestion.

What's kind of interesting, if you're into this sort of thing, is that more than any other (Jewish) holiday, Passover is based on a narrative. If one were to try and place the narrative in a genre - other than "Religious studies" - it would be a pretty difficult task. The story has the literary elements of an epic saga, magical realism, an immigrant tale, and contains the best car chase in (fictive) history.

But the Seder isn't simply about re-telling the book of Exodus. It's an analysis of and an embellishment on it. We don't use the Old Testament to guide ourselves through the evening, rather the story is transplanted into our Haggadot, or prayer books. This distancing of the text from its primary source immediately opens the story up to interpretation. If you search for Haggadot on Amazon, there are over one hundred different entries — one hundred different interpretations of the same story.

The old joke is, if there are two Jews having a conversation, then most likely there are three opinions. Not to stereotype my own religion, but it seems we take and make our theologic meanings by letting our separate sentiments disperse and then converge, rather than everyone working from the same origin.

A few years back, my father found this fairly esoteric haggadah compiled by Gérard Garouste and Marc-Alain Ouaknin, and we've been referring to it on-and-off at our recent Seders. Perusing it last week, I found this kind of incredible passage on the meaning of re-telling the exodus story, which I think has ramifications for writing and reading in general (N.B. - the portion of the Seder specifically designated for relating Exodus is called the maggid):

"Maggid" means, "he tells." Maggid is the most important part, at least qualitatively, of the Haggadah. It is the account of the Exodus from Egypt, an anthology compiled from texts chosen by the Sages of the Talmud.

Maggid is preceded by the breaking of matzoh. The words of the telling emerge from that break, from the empty place left between the two pieces of matzah. That breaking is an invitation to the reader to enter the text to say his own word there. That is why the following part is called maggid, "he tells," rather than "the account." The two pieces of matzah indicate that there must be two in order for the text to exist - the author and the reader. The reader of the Haggadah is not merely the keeper of the text, but also its co-author. The break thus comes to draw the readers out of passivity to make them enter the play of writing, to give them access to the enchantments of writing. The reader is not the dazzled or bored spectator of a story made elsewhere, with which he or she has only a distant relationship. The text speaks to us, about us, and about our own history.

This duality thus becomes that of the text and its commentary. To read is always to comment.

"To read is always to comment." — Isn't that great stuff? I feel like they've nailed down the magic of reading a great book — those moments when you feel a bit more connected to the text, as if you'd predicted what would happen before you read it, as if it was something you'd wanted to say, that a particular author happened to say for you.
Speaking of — to take this post in another direction, I thought I'd just mention a couple books that have come out of Seder literature. First of all, the character of Merry Levov in Philip Roth's American Pastoral re-enacts the Exodus. During the Vietnam War, she bombs a post office to protest U.S. Policy, much as Moses was protesting Egyptian policy when he murdered a harsh slave driver. Soon thereafter, Merry goes into underground exile, just like Moses, to hide from her would-be punishers. I'm making it sound a bit blatant, but Roth, as per usual, establishes this subtly and beautifully.

Second, though I won't expound on it, I'm pretty sure Saul Bellow's epic The Adventures of Augie March can be read as an Exodus journey.

Lastly, Beckett's Waiting for Godot could be said to come out of the tradition. At Seder, we are commanded to set an extra place for Elijah, the prophet, whose coming signals the coming of the Messiah. We leave our front doors open (neighborhood depending), and fill the extra plate with those symbols so central to the holiday. But he never comes. Obviously.

Unless you happen to be in my family. Around sundown on the first night of Passover, we are visited by Elijah, who happens to be four-foot-ten, maybe ninety pounds. He sports a cotton-ball beard, and a caftan my grandparents picked up on an elder hostel to Morocco about a decade ago. He brings wishes of peace and brotherhood, and then disappears into the bathroom from where, five minutes hence, Superman-like, my grandmother emerges.