I received the following re-rebuttal comment from Anon, who tore into me as I highlighted in this post.
"Your club-bopping and bed-hopping are irrelevant. Red herring dispensed with, now on to the work.
• I missed the part where you said it was unrepresentative. Perhaps I should refresh my cache. I did, however, notice the portion where you shared “an example passage in Fictions which is the sort of thing I believe the discerning reader should enjoy”. I also read one of your earlier posts where you discussed your ideal reader, who, based on your characterization, is a member of a thin subset in an already slender sample. The other portion where you advise that “any reading of Fictions, not to offer a Cliffs Notes on my own book, should be done the way you drink a particularly fine Merlot, rinsing it around in your brain a little before digesting it” also made a dent on my consciousness. So, if you are to be believed, this unrepresentative excerpt is an example of work that can be mined for deeper meaning, and yet you would recommend that your discerning readers, primed to decipher such meaning no doubt, read Fictions in a manner that would support those sorts of minute excavations. Sisyphus will want a copy. If the excerpt is unrepresentative, as you now claim, I have a few questions. Is Fictions littered with passages that your discerning readers would not enjoy? If I don’t enjoy it, am I undiscerning?
• Hyperbole without humor is a bit too acrid for my taste. Omeros is not, by any interpretation of the words, as popular or widely read as the Bible/Tolkien (ha!) I believe originality, and not opacity, was the metric I used to determine success. In case my previous comment did not bring the point home, your allusions are unoriginal because they were both drawn from a banal source and simply sit on the page, unremarkable and unchanged. Using a well-known source raises the bar on the output (if I sing a song to which you know every note, you will be much more sensitive to problems of pitch on my part); obscurity might have piqued the interest even when artistry failed. Also, through no fault of yours, I’ve seen those same allusions employed to much better effect by numerous authors. I will concede that your allusions are just as obvious as Walcott’s, but that’s where the similarity between this (I’ll force myself to stay on topic, but your insinuation that the mere mention of an elven woman and a dark man warrants an association to the great master is unforgivable, particularly when it was as clumsily executed as this was) and Omeros ends. A pastiche of choppy metaphors does not equal ironic mimesis utilized as a tool of repudiation and reclamation.
• Mutual adoration is not implicit in the excerpt. It may be so in the preceding paragraphs. In this snippet, the adoration is ascribed solely to the female character; the male in the very next line reveals that his capacity for adoration has been spent elsewhere. The rest, religious undertones aside, is just sex. The act of eating and drinking alone do not connote adoration. Judas (and Peter after a fashion) ate, drank and betrayed. That may well be your subtle, though rich, meaning.
• The canon is littered with wispy elves you can reference simply for their trusting innocence. If you must have this imagery, pick any of them. Tolkien’s elves are far more complex. Furthermore, you’d be hard-pressed to tie your hero and heroine’s (based on their actions in the snippet) morality to that of Tolkien’s elves, especially in reference to sex and marriage."
First of all, I'm insulted that you should refer me to the performing monkey that is Junot Diaz for an example of proper writing. I have no literary respect for Diaz, Dabydeen, Danticat or any of those who mine their exoticism, tap into the communal guilt and fascination of societies in which they are minorities, in order to reap compromised literary rewards. What we are seeing is not true literary merit but affirmative action, not prize-winning but reparations. Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Oondatje however are the type of [minority/immigrant] writer that I respect.
Readers may look to this excerpt of Diaz' work Pulitzer Prize winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao for what his publishers constitute either a representative or exemplary sample, something you should buy the book on the strength of. It is ironic that you would cite Diaz as an example of sublimeness: there is nothing either sublime or literarily lowbrow about either the New Yorker story or the excerpt from Oscar Wao, with its pandering Spanglish and other self-conscious exoticisms (Laxmi, curry, fuku, Trujillo) which are only there so insulated (mostly Caucasian) Americans can kowtow to him and say how quaint and ethnic and literate is the "Dominican" who incidentally left Dominica at fucking five. By the way, is the allusion/homage to Hemingway in the title of Diaz' book "trite" or clever?
You can't accuse me of gimmickry and try to show me the error of my ways by citing even worse gimmickry. My ideal reader is at their particularly zenith because they exist in the society in which I am writing from, and can potentially see themselves and their society in what I represent. The average, intelligent, young non-Guyanese is not too far below my ideal reader, by the way, as neither is the average literary egghead in tweeds and glasses tucked away in some comfortable bastion of Western academia. The irony is, were I to find a US publisher (no Pulitzer since I don't happen to be a US citizen), with the right compromises I'd have a fairly good shot of enjoying roughly the same sort of critical acclaim as a Diaz or a Danticat.
And a note on the fine wine thing, don't take all of my cockiness too literally. It's mostly tongue-in-cheek, so ostentatious as to appear absurd, which is the point. All I require of my reader is to read my book and hopefully enjoy it for what they get out of it, my personal disappointments at how many people get how much of what notwithstanding.
Your comment on mutual adoration et cetera: I've already explained that implicit in the "she drank of my body, I tasted her flesh" is a perversion of the Blessed Sacrament wherein both lovers are adorer and adoree, hence both are sacred and capable of committing sacrilege. The juxtaposition of his observation of her adoration and his confession of his sacrilegious transference are necessary precisely because of the need to show the definitive act of sacrilege - she's adoring him, he should be looking at her and adoring her back because that is their thing, but instead of worshiping her he "sometimes" wishes that she was his wife. This should be apparent to any discerning reader.
I am too tired to defend the "dark bulk, elven paleness" thing again - I feel like Barack Obama explaining Ayers to the McCain campaign. And let me concede you the "representative/unrepresentative" point since reading what I said about not littering a passage with allusion and metaphor just for the sake of it does not necessarily translate to "this is not what I do in all my work." To express my mea culpas, I'm going to give excerpts of various stories in Fictions in my next or a subsequent post.
The "eating, drinking" reference/allusion is not to the Last Supper but to its subsequent incorporation into sacred ritual, The Blessed Sacrament, wherein it is implicit that anyone who takes part is a devotee and therefore capable of betrayal - in much the same way that it isn't really infidelity if you screw someone else after a one-night stand but if you do it during a prolonged affair then it has a greater chance of being classifiable as such. As regards unoriginality of metaphor, please cite three literary works in which the Blessed Sacrament and/or Resurrection and/or Parousia have been used as sexual parallels. I see the subversion inherent within the metaphor/allusion as original, and you have yet to cite a single of these numerous works to prove me otherwise.
"Pastiche of choppy metaphors...". Lol. You have got to be kidding me. It's a short story, the brief excerpted passage of which uses one central reference, with the only "digression" being the dark bulk/elven paleness which itself ties into an overarching theme of taboo/forbidden intimacy inherent within the story, hence your "pastiche" label doesn't quite work here.
My "club-bopping and bed-hopping", by the way, would not be "irrelevant" if you are who I think you are. If it isn't the person I think it is, then it shows a certain zealotry that is unbecoming of any proper literary critic; I hated the excremental first pages of Dabydeen's Molly and the Muslim Stick but, to be fair, I waded through the entire sewer of the novel to say definitively that the book is utter shit - I haven't pronounced on Wao in its entirety because it would be dishonest. Yet you are offering a flawed supposedly literary judgment of a book based on a small excerpt.
If it is however the person I am referring to, you are human and I hurt you and I am sorry, but it would explain the sort of rabid need for deconstruction in what is possibly the most intelligent criticism of my work I have received to date.
"Your club-bopping and bed-hopping are irrelevant. Red herring dispensed with, now on to the work.
• I missed the part where you said it was unrepresentative. Perhaps I should refresh my cache. I did, however, notice the portion where you shared “an example passage in Fictions which is the sort of thing I believe the discerning reader should enjoy”. I also read one of your earlier posts where you discussed your ideal reader, who, based on your characterization, is a member of a thin subset in an already slender sample. The other portion where you advise that “any reading of Fictions, not to offer a Cliffs Notes on my own book, should be done the way you drink a particularly fine Merlot, rinsing it around in your brain a little before digesting it” also made a dent on my consciousness. So, if you are to be believed, this unrepresentative excerpt is an example of work that can be mined for deeper meaning, and yet you would recommend that your discerning readers, primed to decipher such meaning no doubt, read Fictions in a manner that would support those sorts of minute excavations. Sisyphus will want a copy. If the excerpt is unrepresentative, as you now claim, I have a few questions. Is Fictions littered with passages that your discerning readers would not enjoy? If I don’t enjoy it, am I undiscerning?
• Hyperbole without humor is a bit too acrid for my taste. Omeros is not, by any interpretation of the words, as popular or widely read as the Bible/Tolkien (ha!) I believe originality, and not opacity, was the metric I used to determine success. In case my previous comment did not bring the point home, your allusions are unoriginal because they were both drawn from a banal source and simply sit on the page, unremarkable and unchanged. Using a well-known source raises the bar on the output (if I sing a song to which you know every note, you will be much more sensitive to problems of pitch on my part); obscurity might have piqued the interest even when artistry failed. Also, through no fault of yours, I’ve seen those same allusions employed to much better effect by numerous authors. I will concede that your allusions are just as obvious as Walcott’s, but that’s where the similarity between this (I’ll force myself to stay on topic, but your insinuation that the mere mention of an elven woman and a dark man warrants an association to the great master is unforgivable, particularly when it was as clumsily executed as this was) and Omeros ends. A pastiche of choppy metaphors does not equal ironic mimesis utilized as a tool of repudiation and reclamation.
• Mutual adoration is not implicit in the excerpt. It may be so in the preceding paragraphs. In this snippet, the adoration is ascribed solely to the female character; the male in the very next line reveals that his capacity for adoration has been spent elsewhere. The rest, religious undertones aside, is just sex. The act of eating and drinking alone do not connote adoration. Judas (and Peter after a fashion) ate, drank and betrayed. That may well be your subtle, though rich, meaning.
• If the juxtaposition of high and low art is your thing, then Junot Diaz might be of interest to you. It took him ten years to write BWLOW and with good reason. He is so nimble at his craft that you never see the sleight of hand or suffer a ponderous fumble as he shifts flawlessly from the lowbrow to the sublime.
(http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/12/24/071224fi_fiction_diaz?currentPage=1)
(http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/12/24/071224fi_fiction_diaz?currentPage=1)
• The canon is littered with wispy elves you can reference simply for their trusting innocence. If you must have this imagery, pick any of them. Tolkien’s elves are far more complex. Furthermore, you’d be hard-pressed to tie your hero and heroine’s (based on their actions in the snippet) morality to that of Tolkien’s elves, especially in reference to sex and marriage."
First of all, I'm insulted that you should refer me to the performing monkey that is Junot Diaz for an example of proper writing. I have no literary respect for Diaz, Dabydeen, Danticat or any of those who mine their exoticism, tap into the communal guilt and fascination of societies in which they are minorities, in order to reap compromised literary rewards. What we are seeing is not true literary merit but affirmative action, not prize-winning but reparations. Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Oondatje however are the type of [minority/immigrant] writer that I respect.
Readers may look to this excerpt of Diaz' work Pulitzer Prize winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao for what his publishers constitute either a representative or exemplary sample, something you should buy the book on the strength of. It is ironic that you would cite Diaz as an example of sublimeness: there is nothing either sublime or literarily lowbrow about either the New Yorker story or the excerpt from Oscar Wao, with its pandering Spanglish and other self-conscious exoticisms (Laxmi, curry, fuku, Trujillo) which are only there so insulated (mostly Caucasian) Americans can kowtow to him and say how quaint and ethnic and literate is the "Dominican" who incidentally left Dominica at fucking five. By the way, is the allusion/homage to Hemingway in the title of Diaz' book "trite" or clever?
You can't accuse me of gimmickry and try to show me the error of my ways by citing even worse gimmickry. My ideal reader is at their particularly zenith because they exist in the society in which I am writing from, and can potentially see themselves and their society in what I represent. The average, intelligent, young non-Guyanese is not too far below my ideal reader, by the way, as neither is the average literary egghead in tweeds and glasses tucked away in some comfortable bastion of Western academia. The irony is, were I to find a US publisher (no Pulitzer since I don't happen to be a US citizen), with the right compromises I'd have a fairly good shot of enjoying roughly the same sort of critical acclaim as a Diaz or a Danticat.
And a note on the fine wine thing, don't take all of my cockiness too literally. It's mostly tongue-in-cheek, so ostentatious as to appear absurd, which is the point. All I require of my reader is to read my book and hopefully enjoy it for what they get out of it, my personal disappointments at how many people get how much of what notwithstanding.
Your comment on mutual adoration et cetera: I've already explained that implicit in the "she drank of my body, I tasted her flesh" is a perversion of the Blessed Sacrament wherein both lovers are adorer and adoree, hence both are sacred and capable of committing sacrilege. The juxtaposition of his observation of her adoration and his confession of his sacrilegious transference are necessary precisely because of the need to show the definitive act of sacrilege - she's adoring him, he should be looking at her and adoring her back because that is their thing, but instead of worshiping her he "sometimes" wishes that she was his wife. This should be apparent to any discerning reader.
I am too tired to defend the "dark bulk, elven paleness" thing again - I feel like Barack Obama explaining Ayers to the McCain campaign. And let me concede you the "representative/unrepresentative" point since reading what I said about not littering a passage with allusion and metaphor just for the sake of it does not necessarily translate to "this is not what I do in all my work." To express my mea culpas, I'm going to give excerpts of various stories in Fictions in my next or a subsequent post.
The "eating, drinking" reference/allusion is not to the Last Supper but to its subsequent incorporation into sacred ritual, The Blessed Sacrament, wherein it is implicit that anyone who takes part is a devotee and therefore capable of betrayal - in much the same way that it isn't really infidelity if you screw someone else after a one-night stand but if you do it during a prolonged affair then it has a greater chance of being classifiable as such. As regards unoriginality of metaphor, please cite three literary works in which the Blessed Sacrament and/or Resurrection and/or Parousia have been used as sexual parallels. I see the subversion inherent within the metaphor/allusion as original, and you have yet to cite a single of these numerous works to prove me otherwise.
"Pastiche of choppy metaphors...". Lol. You have got to be kidding me. It's a short story, the brief excerpted passage of which uses one central reference, with the only "digression" being the dark bulk/elven paleness which itself ties into an overarching theme of taboo/forbidden intimacy inherent within the story, hence your "pastiche" label doesn't quite work here.
My "club-bopping and bed-hopping", by the way, would not be "irrelevant" if you are who I think you are. If it isn't the person I think it is, then it shows a certain zealotry that is unbecoming of any proper literary critic; I hated the excremental first pages of Dabydeen's Molly and the Muslim Stick but, to be fair, I waded through the entire sewer of the novel to say definitively that the book is utter shit - I haven't pronounced on Wao in its entirety because it would be dishonest. Yet you are offering a flawed supposedly literary judgment of a book based on a small excerpt.
If it is however the person I am referring to, you are human and I hurt you and I am sorry, but it would explain the sort of rabid need for deconstruction in what is possibly the most intelligent criticism of my work I have received to date.
1 comment:
There is no need for further discussion is there? You want to be right more than you want to be great. I'm up for a pissing match but I can't take on both you and your ego at the same time. Particularly when the stakes are so low.
Any author, every author, possessed of a temperate disposition and dogged personality can ably defend their work, if they so choose. Those with a more didactic bent to their personality can respond to every critique of their work with a treatise on how the work should read; a zealous few take this tendency to its ignoble end and try to counsel readers on the interpretations they should make and the meanings they should in an attempt to hold hostage the discourse of narrative and nuance--a control they relinquish in the very act of publishing.
The greats balance their compulsion to creation with bouts of manic optimism, chronic insecurity and are able to alchemize their condition into the actualizing truths for which we revere them. Apparently, you are not so burdened, except by your own complacency.
Why strive when the accolades come so easily to the big fish in the tiny pond? Why engage in honest intertextual analysis when you could adorn yourself with garlands of pretty words? Why bother when you've already convinced yourself that any reward could be yours if you'd only get off the pot and use your fingers instead of your sphincter? Why grow when you can rest on your laurels, and point to penny-ante prizes dispensed in what you've previously acknowledged as a vacuum of talent, in a calcified state of supposed genius? Why seek out worthy opponents when you can condescend to peons? Why be an artist when you can be an author? Why indeed.
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