not enough finished art for a year in review so here's some doodles from theoughout the year! here's to a peaceful and beautiful 2023 🎉

I am burned out on politics and hot weather—burned to the socket, as the poet said—so on my regular walks I have been desultorily listening to the Bennington College podcast from the end of last year. If it’s good enough for Goop—image above borrowed from Lili Anolik’s ’gram—it’s good enough for me. Undoubtedly seductive. This must be that mimetic desire the Catholic reactionaries are always warning us about: I half-listen and half-daydream, wanting to be such a famous writer that Anolik breathily rehearses my high-school romances. 

But, Lili will admonish me, it’s too late: her subtext is that these Gen-X luminaries—Ellis, Tartt, and Lethem—were, generationally speaking, the last serious American writers to command celebrity-level audiences before the final 21st-century onset of civilizational illiteracy. I never really got into the Gen-X writers anyway, though. I’ve ignored Ellis and Lethem all these years, though the pod is spectacular publicity for the former, and I wasn’t able to take Tartt with entire seriousness when I finally read The Secret History a couple of years ago, much as I viscerally enjoyed the novel. (I had the same reaction back around 2013, incidentally, to the book Anolik holds up as Tartt’s inspiration and precursor: Brideshead Revisited.) As I wrote:

In theory, Tartt means to morally indict the classics-obsessed mentality, the way pornographers used to preface their works with an assurance that all the fornication to follow was offered merely as a cautionary tale. In practice, just as Mario Puzo succeeded only in glamorizing the mafia, Norman Lear inadvertently turned Archie Bunker into a folk hero, and even Nabokov inspired some number of young girls to don heart-shaped glasses in a misunderstanding of his fable’s import, Tartt has only created a cult around her classicists’ cultus. She bears some responsibility for this ostensible misprision, it must be said.

[...]

With these unconvincing feints, popular fiction tries to morally launder the iniquitous and inequitable fantasy of freedom it proffers to readers. Despite poptimists’ charge that critics of Tartt are “elitist” when they point out her melodramatic plotting, evidenced by this weighty novel’s many empty calories of ersatz suspense, or her often overwrought prose (“His eyes were magnified and wicked behind his pince-nez”), the source of this novel’s popularity is nevertheless its daydream fantasy about joining the elite. Then again, maybe this moral duplicity is not entirely Tartt’s fault. Truffaut’s famous if apocryphal adage on the limits of cinema—he is supposed to have said, “There is no such thing as an anti-war film,” since movies glamorize everything—might hold true for all the arts and any subject matter. To create an effective work of art about [X] is to fashion [X] into the artifice of eternity, and what could be more glamorous than that? Another temptation is to say that great literature shouldn’t imaginatively fulfill the audience’s wishes, but too many readers want to marry Messrs. Darcy and Rochester or to join the conversation in Joyce’s Dublin and on Mann’s mountain for this to be true. To the endless despair of spartan socialists and other preachers of grayly Mao-jacketed justice, accession to the exceptionality of art is what common readers—and here I count myself among them—have always wanted. We are all Richard Papen.

For my money, the peak of American literature after the tradition’s Romantic founders—those seven dwarves and a princess, as an old professor of mine once called them: Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson—was scaled not by the modernists or by the postwar masters but rather by the Silent Generation who commanded the 20th century’s final quarter. I wrote about this in an essay on Speedboat:

Almost every member of American literature’s last unambiguously major generation, the giants passing from the scene, was born in the 1930s: Carver (b. 1938), DeLillo (b. 1936), Didion (b. 1934), McCarthy (b. 1933), Morrison (b. 1931), Oates (b. 1938), Pynchon (b. 1937), Roth (b. 1933), Sontag (b. 1933), Updike (b. 1932), Wolfe (b. 1930)—and we can add some that are only a few years off in either direction for good measure, like Le Guin (b. 1929) or Ozick (b. 1928) or Irving (b. 1942). We might even take a cue from the Swedish Academy and adduce Bob Dylan (b. 1941).

This fact should be surprising since the Silent Generation, born from around 1925 to 1945, is so called because it came between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers and seemed to leave less of an obvious historical mark than either. But perhaps its greatest effect was on American letters. I came across an explanation for why this might be so in a 2015 profile of the renascent journalist and novelist Renata Adler (b. 1937):

In an essay from 1970 (“Introduction, Toward A Radical Middle”), Adler argues that her generation “grew up separately, without a rhetoric.” They, the Silent Generation, are small, caught between two Americas: too young to have been involved in World War II or to fully absorb its traumas, but too old to have been wholly included in the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. “In a way, in culture and in politics,” Adler writes, “we are the last custodians of language—because of the books we read, and because history, in our time, has wrung so many changes on the meaning of terms, and we, having never generationally perpetrated anything, have no commitment to any distortion of them.”

Precisely the sociological in-betweenness that made this generation less interesting for demographers than stereotyped GIs or hippies also made its members ideal, because somewhat detached, observers of the mid-to-late 20th century.

(By the way, I should admit I take a self-serving interest in this dubious topic of generational analysis because I wonder if those of us born around 1980 might not form a similarly well-positioned cultural cohort. We were also reared on a historical fulcrum: our childhood and adolescent sensibilities were shaped by the print/analog world of the lingering postwar liberal order even as we grew to adulthood after 9/11 and on the Internet. Like the Silent Generation before us, we have a foot on each side of our time’s major socio-historical divides.)

I don’t know how that last prophecy is holding up. Probably not as well as I’d like. A casualty, perhaps, of the in-person communal effects the Bennington pod so compellingly narrates, effects increasingly absent from our 21st-century lives in the metaverse. 

Relatedly, I was intrigued to see Nicholas Delbanco figure so heavily in the Bennington narrative. I fear he’s been somewhat forgotten as a novelist, but I once discovered a very good nonfiction book of his, one he would have been writing around the time he had Ellis in his fiction class. It’s called Group Portrait and makes the case that writers need to exist in community by dwelling on a period at the turn of the last century when Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, and H. G. Wells all lived near one another in the English countryside. It’s a curious example of needful community, though, because it’s hard to say what exactly came of this grouping, aside, maybe, from Conrad’s revivification by his young collaborator Ford. As I wrote in my essay on Group Portrait:

In conclusion, we might ask: why is the Kentish convocation of the turn-of-the-century’s major Anglophone writers less heralded than later modernist enclaves? Delbanco allows for one that this was a male preserve; as I’ve already discussed here, the period from roughly 1880-1910 in English letters was highly and willfully masculinist, more so than the periods that preceded and succeeded it. Kent and East Sussex did not have the presiding female geniuses of Bloomsbury or expat Paris—no Woolfs or Steins, only the wives and domestic servants that made the men’s writing possible (though Woolf and Stein, it should be said, relied on similar support).

Another reason is the ambiguity of the achievement resulting from these writers’ neighborhood co-habitation. Crane did his best work before he arrived; if you don’t count Nostromo, Conrad’s and Ford’s collaboration didn’t issue in a masterwork; and James and Wells produced a quarrel, not an opus. Add to that the lack of sexual tension and soap opera—this despite Wells’s complicated love life and the homoeroticism that, in different ways, adheres to the lives and/or works of Crane, Conrad, and James—and you have a less immediately exciting story than Hemingway sparring in cafés or Lytton Strachey pointing out the spot of semen on Vanessa Bell’s dress.

The irony or coincidence or synchronicity is that Delbanco does for the turn-of-the-century novelists in his book what Anolik does for the Gen-Xers in her podcast. And yet a podcast is not a book, and Donna Tartt is not Joseph Conrad, and I am not (yet) a famous writer; and in the high summer heat, all that is solid melts into air.

#219 Macguffins

Superheroes know better than anyone that not everything is created equal. Just like there are human beings who can perform incredible feats and possess unparalleled powers, so too are there items or objects that can perform incredible feats and possess unparalleled powers. These objects are your kingmaking swords, your orbs of all everything, your matrices, your vectors, your parabolas of ultimate destiny. These objects are collectively known as macguffins, and you really need to get your hands on them.

A macguffin is, how do I describe it? (You’re a writer!) Hush! A macguffin, and I want to do this justice because it is literally impossible to overstate their importances, is a catch all term for all of the world’s most important items ever. And while that may sound like an oxymoron -how can there be multiple most important items?- I assure you that it is not. Every single one of these items, devices, jewels, folders, suitcases, and guys named Ryan is the singular most valuable, powerful and relevant (to all situations) item in the cosmos. The terms, in most universes, comes from the wizard Maxamillidiousfrey “Mac” Guffin who spent his retirement years enchanting dozens of objects and then sending poor schlubs on quest after quest to retrieve them all. 

Throughout your career as a derring-do-gooder, you’ll find that you’ll have to track down many a macguffin. As you should be, as one of the most powerful and noble beings in the universe, it is only natural that you should be selected to track down the holy grail or the ark of the covenant or that droid that escaped from the future and has the outcomes for the next forty world series. (Yes, you read that right folks, baseball is gonna continue to exist for the next forty years. That’s approximately 97,200 more regular season professional baseball games. Karallaxus have mercy on our souls.) Or, if this is something you’ve taken upon yourself, it only makes sense that after centuries of dead-ends, failed expectations and mysterious deaths, that you should be the one to finally find this mysterious hidden object, because you’re the hero. And that’s what heroes do. 

But since these items are so insanely, infamously and incomprehensibly indomitable, you certainly won’t be the only one searching for it. Why, these objects are so mighty that they can be used to do such “i” things! Think of the great evil that can be performed with such omnipotent objects. Lots of great evil. Which actually isn’t very great at all. So you can be sure that plenty of greedy, self-serving, or just plain megalomaniacal entities are going to be following the same trail towards all-power that you are. Obviously you can’t allow such unmatched potential to fall into the hands of a supervillain (or even a petty criminal. Most petty criminals are simply one divine doohickey away from qualifying for supervillain-hood) the only person pure of heart enough to properly handle a godly goober such as the macguffin you’re chasing is you. 

So, when on the trail for a juicy macguffin, make sure you’re not actually allowing someone with ill-intentions to get their hands on it. When compiling your team (if you even need a team to help you with this, some hyper-powerful hero you are) make sure to do extensive background checks on anybody and everybody who you’re bringing on to help you in your quest. Everybody from your fellow heroes to the guide who will be leading you through the psychedelic tundra or digital rain forest where legend says your macguffin lies. If any of them have any history of not paying traffic tickets or mercenary work or, say, turning into a cackling, wild-eyed, lunatic when they come into contact with glowing crystals of unknown origin, they should quietly be removed from your roster. Once you’ve down all the internal housekeeping you can do, you need to make sure that none of the progress you make in deciphering the riddles or uncovering the clues history has left you is able to help any villains. 

Supervillains are a lazy lot, and they’ve been known to allow a superhero or earnest adventurer or self-declared genius to do all the heavy lifting and searching before swooping in and claiming the prodigious object for themselves. (And then using it to turn everybody in the world into a monkey or a puddle of goop or whatever.) So you need to make sure they can’t piggyback off of your journey. That can mean anything from simply not publicizing your findings to starting a deliberate misinformation campaign. Have your interns come up with, and then leak, lies to all the major media outlets. (Make sure they’re interns who have never been kidnapped by supervillains, you don’t want any sleeper agents or trojan horses leaking any real info to the bad guys.) Tell them to have fun with it. When it comes to locating macguffins, nothing is too outrageous or unbelievable. They could say that you’ve determined, based on a tip from a friendly mer-lion, that the location of the fifth crystal of chaos can be found tattooed on the inner lip of an oyster at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. They could say that research done by Professor Leon Von Iguanodon has revealed that the Lost Heart of Floon is actually located on an asteroid in the Kuiper Belt.  They could even say that after hours of meditation you received a vision saying that the map to the fabled Ankh of Ramesweets can only be found in a fifth edition printing of a beloved children’s book. They could say anything and the bad guys would still have to pay it serious consideration because it still wouldn’t be the wildest thing that’s ever happened in pursuit of a macguffin. Don’t get distracted by this step though. While it’s true that it’s incredibly fun and amusing to send supervillains on increasingly elaborate and evermore absurd wild goose chases, please remember that you need to delegate it to someone else. You need to stay focused on actually finding this macguffin. The entire world, nay, the entirety of all worlds, nay the entirety of everything that ever once existed or ever will exits, depends on you finding this object. This is not hyperbole. You need to find the macguffin. 

Over the course of your pursuit of the macguffin, you’ll no doubt travel to exotic realms, meet and befriend (or antagonize) fascinating people, you might lose a limb, you might gain a limb, anything can happen. You’ll fight goons, beasts, the stone dragon that guards the Crypt of Eve. You’ll lose your mind and find your soul and discover your heart. (Sometimes literally, remember when Tattler discovered his own still-beating heart at the bottom of an infinite well at the culmination of a seven year quest?) You’ll accrue stories by the dozen, and you’ll have the scars to prove it. But at the end, oh boy, at the end it will have all been worth it. Because you’ll find it. You’ll find the amulet, the scarab, the piece of grilled cheese with a religious figure’s face on it. After all those years. After all those who tried before you fell. After everyone told you to give up, that you were a fool for even believing in the thing that you spent your entire life searching for. After all of that and more you’ll finally have found it. The macguffin. The most important thing in the galaxy. And you’ll finally be able to use it to... uh... wait one second... to do... hmm... wait, what’s it for again?