D&D, fiction and repetition, being a cheap date
December 23, 2004
In some way I am still trying to come to terms with the mental image of Josh Corey playing Dungeons & Dragons when he was younger. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to internalize that he still plays. And he’s very eloquent about it. But I shouldn’t be surprised– some of the most insightful and creative people I know were D&D players, and many probably still are. I never got into it. That’s probably a sign pointing to something about myself I’d rather not think about.
In his latest post involving D&D Josh ponders the question of why he didn’t turn to fiction instead of poetry, given the narrative invention that is at the heart of the game. Looking at his answer, and given his past discussion of organic/inorganic and newness, I’m more surprised than ever that he’s not a big fan of some of what’s going on in fiction. I’m thinking, for instance, that Corey might really enjoy how Lethem twisted and reinvented the mystery novel with Gun with Occasional Music and Motherless Brooklyn.
In a perceptive comment, Bas of Changes of the Untamed Soul talks about motivation and repetition with a light (and well-deserved) admonishment to “by all means be humble towards any one who takes time to write…” We’ve talked here about some commentators soft spot for people trying to do something new. I have my own inclination to be generous towards people who are trying for the right reason. Of course I base this completely– and unfairly– on my own divination of one’s motivations, thus my equal sympathy for a conventional author who works very hard at his craft doing what he knows and a new author flailing around in the deep end of the pool for perhaps the first time. And so my antipathy when it feels that the writer wants to shirk the obligation (and I’m old fashioned that way) needed to make a work that communicates with some intentionality in favor of throwing words out and seeing what sticks. Bas’s note was a timely reminder of my promise to talk about poems more than poetry and reiterate my respect for all who write. The circle might seem large when talking about the consumers and producers of poetry, but there are actually damn few of us.
The problem for me is I’m just a cheap poetic date. I don’t need to feel that my partner is trying something brand new and making clear the evidence of their struggle in the easy arms of rhetoric and received wisdom. Give me a new image, give me something I haven’t thought of before or in a new way, make a little beautiful music, and I’m that poem’s, at least for a while. It’s this easygoing attitude that gets me a lot of artistic dates– I’m perfectly willing to cuddle up with some avant garde Jazz for a while and then, without even changing my clothes, get slightly bang my head to some relatively faceless alternative rock band of the moment, then fall asleep with a singer-songwriter or some mashed-up electronica. I make the rules.
Tags:
Fiction and Lit, Poetry and Poetics, Psyche
All me-stream all the time.
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December 23rd, 2004 at 1:41 pm
Actually, I have read both Lethem books and enjoyed them. But that’s precisely because they play with genre, so that I can actually relish the creaking of the tired old plot machinery being sent in a surprising new direction. Most of the “serious literary fiction” I pick up strikes me as labored and pretentious in the first few pages. Not to mention how badly overwritten most of it is. The fiction that moves me the most deeply tends to act a lot like poetry by either playing with language or intimately tracking the movements of consciousness–Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, Sebald. Nearly as good are socially sprawling novels with comic spirits–Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas comes to mind. But I haven’t come across any more recent examples of that sort of writing that I liked. I guess I’m just a modernist at heart.
December 23rd, 2004 at 1:56 pm
That’s actually heartening… you name some of my favorites and I posited that *you* might enjoy some of the “postmodernist” work whereas I generally don’t either. Lethem is one of MANY good authors playing with genre and conventions in enjoyable, but not wholly contrived and disconnected “experimental” ways. What about John Irving or David Foster Wallace?
Still, much of contemporary experimental fiction strikes me as labored and pretentious too– unfortunately those same characteristics are too often admired in post avant (or whatever you want to call it) poetry, when to my mind it exemplifies how they are both weak in many of the same ways.