Michael Swanwick, What Can Be Saved From The Wreckage? James Branch Cabell In The Twenty-First Century

Aesthetic standards are, of course, subjective, and few arguments descend into pointlessness, point-scoring, and appeals to the authority of popularity/mass appeal/"the test of time" [1] more quickly than those regarding quality.

You could be talking about music...

"Led Zeppelin RULES"
     -> "Wrong, they SUCK!"
          -> "You don't have to like them, but you gotta respect their chops!"
               -> "But they RIPPED OFF all those bluesmen!"
                    -> "Well, they must have been doing SOMETHING right because they're still the undisputed kings of ROCKING when those bluesmen are FORGOTTEN!"
                        -> And so on

...or painting...

"Jackson Pollack? My 5-year-old could do that! And Thomas Kinkade might be the most successful painter alive but he's also the worst!"

"In 200 years, no one will remember Anne Geddes [I know, not a painter, whatever], but people will still be studying Picasso. I like Picasso. You like Anne Geddes. Nuff said."

...or literature...

"We still read Shakespeare while many of his contemporaries lie forgotten because his works speak to deeper truths that everyone can relate to."

"Blah, blah, blah, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, archetypes, God, the Bible."

...and so on. I don't need to dig up every argument about the Oprah book club or Harold Bloom's canon or whatever; you know what I'm talking about. It's a black hole drawing in authenticity and influence and commercialism and everything else, and a lot of the time it gets unbelievably stupid to argue about what we'll be reading/watching/listening to in the years to come as if that had any bearing on what we should pay attention to now. This is (in part) because there's a huge arbitrary element to what remains or gains popularity over time (and adding preservation into the equation, it becomes more random the farther back you go -- though everything is going to change with the Internet and electronic storage, of course). But regardless of the reasons to which you attribute his continued survival, Shakespeare's still around, and the question of why some authors have endured and some haven't can be an intriguing one -- so far as it illuminates the virtues of the texts themselves.

Which brings us to What Can Be Saved From The Wreckage, a brief but fascinating overview of James Branch Cabell's works, both major and minor. Author Michael Swanwick sets the context :

It is hard to imagine today the magnitude of James Branch Cabell's fame in the early part of the last century. Cabell's books were Mark Twain's chief reading in the great humorist's declining years. Theodore Roosevelt received him at the White House. The occultist Aleister Crowley harried him with fan letters. H.L. Mencken was his advocate. [...] Sinclair Lewis, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, mentioned him as one of a number of writers who might reasonably have won it. (p. 1)

Cabell enjoyed both critical adulation and widespread popularity (only partly owing to Jurgen's major obscenity scandal). He's significant to the development of the field of literary fantasy. He ticked off every box towards what you'd think would lead to a lasting readership. Now he's almost completely forgotten.

How did he drop off the map? That's a good question, and the answer is complicated.

Swanwick argues convincingly that, rather than owing to flaws in the works themselves [3], Cabell's slide into obscurity was primarily self-inflicted, the result of fucking over his readers with a uniform edition of his books. Yes, it's worth noting that Cabell was, in fact, an early victim of the infamous Brain Eater [4], insisting that his collected works formed a monstrous 18 volume "unified philosophical meditation on Life and Mankind" called the Life of Manuel that must be evaluated as a whole and whose component books were both necessary and of equivalent quality (erecting as many impediments to reader accessibility as possible). He revised previous books to insert unnecessary connections to later works and produced pointless genealogies and bad poetry "by" his characters. Later on, he abridged his name, decided he would be writing very different books, and proceeded to write very similar but worse books as his talent waned, his readership lost patience, and his sales dropped.

Still, Swanwick concludes that Cabell's body of work definitely contains enough greatness to warrant a readership (and justifies this with plenty of evidence). Without lamentation, Swanwick acknowledges Cabell's current obscurity and sets out to evaluate the extensive body of work (about 60 books, many of them incredibly hard to find) with the objective of determining which books are worth seeking out (and why), which are of interest only to fans or rely on knowledge of Cabell's other books for their effect, and which are merely forgettable, aimless, unpleasant, or dull.

His analysis is really compelling, to no surprise if you're already familiar with Swanwick as author of innovative SF or as a fantastic critic and essayist (if you haven't read The Postmodern Archipelago, read it right now. There's an elegant encapsulation of how fantasy operates in "In The Tradition" that just *gets* it, absolute truth-wise). He makes me want to read the books he concludes to be vital (reducing the essential Cabell to a much more manageable 6) and he has insightful reasons for rejecting the books he rejects.

Do I believe that this book will lead to Cabell's better books coming back into print, or that it will have any significant effect on Cabell's future reputation or critical reception? Not really; this is, after all, a small press-published essay with a print run of about 200 (if you can find this, snap it up) written by a SF writer who's great and somewhat obscure himself. But it is wonderful as a reader's guide (all I have is a copy of  the Ballantine reprint of The Silver Stallion, which I think I read without comprehension at the age of, like, 6 and might not have touched again without the context this puts it in) and a work of nuanced and evenhanded criticism of a sorely unappreciated major author, and it raises provocative questions about the bizarre process by which literature stands or falls over time.

[1] Whether as a good or bad thing; see indie rock and the cult of obscurity, or the classical music community and attitudes toward lasting popularity. We get into the issue of taste here, which is every bit as loaded and complex, but I'm sidestepping it except to remember to check out Carl Wilson's 33 1/3 book dealing with the subject through a look at Celine Dion. Now that's a good premise right there!

[2] For the stupidity aspect, I love Scharpling and Wurster's Rock, Rot & Rule, in which Jon Wurster's character's book of music criticism does nothing but classify bands on the basis of whether they "rock," "rot," or "rule" for the most hilariously dumb reasons possible and people actually call in to argue with him.

[3] And these flaws certainly aren't ignorable, since (for example) Cabell's sexism in many cases informs the heart of his stories, with men chasing after idealized beauties or settling for shrewish wives; his attitudes towards life are inseparably linked with his attitudes towards women. A modern reader can't read Cabell without some legitimate problems. Plus there are, of course, some books that suck.

[4] It's especially interesting because it adds context to the twilight of Heinlein's later career. I already knew that Heinlein makes plenty of Cabell references and that Job: A Comedy Of Justice is his most Cabellian novel, but now I can see that he was following in Cabell's footsteps with his unconvincing attempts to create a unified fictional universe, making it clear that at least he knew what he was trying to do with his later work, however unsuccessful the implementation. Still remaining to be answered: the question of WHAT'S THE POINT?

David Foster Wallace & Mark Costello, Signifying Rappers: Rap And Race In The Urban Present

This I won't hold against DFW. Published in 1990 and long out-of-print, I have no doubts he and his co-author (I never heard of him, and there's an awful lot of recognizable DFW-voice in here) disavow any opinions they expressed in this, uh, study? of rap, sampling, fame, credibility, and race. They would be right to do so. You know every lame down-with-the-kids teacher you ever had who was all, "Poetry is dead because it's elitist and has lost touch with the common man. The real voice of the people today is in the rap music. So let's translate Julius Caesar into the modern-day vernacular and set it in the ghetto"? This is That Teacher: The Book. Some choice moments:

-De La Soul's "3 Feet High And Rising" "is considered by many rappers an artistic breakthrough of Finnegans Wake proportions." I would like to see one rapper, past or present, who has expressed this opinion. Or anyone not a white college freshman majoring in the Humanities.

-Our authors have solved the rap definition question once and for all: "real or serious rap is not JJ Fad or Tone Loc or Beasties, Egyptian Lover or Fat Boys, not experiments or freakshows or current commercial crossover slush. 'Serious' rap -- a unique U.S. inner-city fusion of funk, technified reggae, teen-to-teen 'hardcore' rock, and the early 70s' 'poetry of the black experience' of Nikki Giovanni, the last poets, etc. -- has [...] always had its real roots in the Neighborhood, the black gang-banger Underground, like trees over septics. Black music, of and for blacks." This would be laughably dated if not for the fact that WE ARE STILL FIGHTING THESE BATTLES, most recently with Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker (although SFJ even at his most lazy and generalizing for provocation's sake is still nowhere near this bad). Critics are still taking their subjective judgments of what they like in a genre, calling it the "essential nature" of that genre, and associating THAT with the genre's "blackness." We don't need the laziness of "black music = innovation, white music = stealing and popularizing" any more than we need more of "white music = thinking, black music = feeling" (both of which this book gets into -- can't find some choice quotes but trust me), not just because they're simplistic, demonstrably wrong generalizations, but because they're no longer useful critical lenses. You just aren't going to say anything interesting of compelling taking those conceptions as your starting point.

-On samples: they "range from staccato record scratches to James Brown and Funkadelic licks, to M.L.K.'s public Dream, to quotidian pop pap like "The Theme from Shaft." James Brown and Funkadelic: Credible, acceptable, valid uses of black musical heritage. Isaac Hayes: Contemptible. They arrived at the right conclusion, but for all the wrong reasons, not citing $c13nt0l0gy at all!

-The authors despise pretty much all rap with mainstream popularity. Their exception? Will Smith's "Girls Ain't Nothing But Trouble," mainly because it offers them the opportunity to construct this elaborate fantasy scenario wherein the Tampa riots of 1967 spill over into an episode of I Dream Of Jeannie (a show which our authors find SO FUCKING WEIRD, man, because there's, like, a conflict between magic and normalcy) and America is forced to confront the REALNESS of black anger, but wait, this song is just like doing exactly that: "Rap's sampling of I Dream Of Jeannie blends homage and rampage, celebrating the open-ended transferability of shared culture and attacking the segregation of the icon by mock-integrating it." Also, the authors consider pretty much any use of or reference to white culture (or anything they find silly or trivial) in rap to be ironic commentary on its whiteness or silliness or triviality.

-Not a criticism of the book at all, in fact a highlight: DFW and MC dig up a truly reprehensible interview with Paul McCartney and Sting, which is worth sharing:

"ct. MTV's "History of Rap" Special, June 8, 1989:
P. McC.: I get so bored with this so-called rap music. "I'm so rich, I have so much money." Me friends say I should make a rap record. I've more money than any of them. Most of us just don't feel a need to wear our income on our sleeve.
Sting: . . . to crow about it like they do. I've always enjoyed black music. . . . This is the first black music I haven't liked. Not that I have anything against it. Don't get me wrong.
P. McC.: That's what they say. That if you don't like the rap you don't like them. You don't like Negroes. You see what they're doing. They're using racism in a racist way themselves."
Sting: They are not very original.
P. McC.: I could tape old Beatles material and move it around and play it back also, and sing about how much money it brings in.
Sting: Anyone could. Is it music if anyone could do it?"

LOL rap more like crap amirite? Seriously, this pretty much discredits both of them from ever having an opinion on anything ever again, and also might qualify them for the death penalty.

-They find the Run-DMC-Aerosmith "Walk This Way" to be hella ironic: "Tearing down the prop-thin symbolic walls, Run-DMC aim to celebrate desegregation, but miss the fact that Aerosmith, those whitest of white rockers, are merely big-budget Led Zeppelin ripoffs, and that Led Zeppelin came straight outta the jet-black Rhythm & Blues of Chicago's Chess Records." Yes, Aerosmith sounds exactly like Led Zeppelin with more money! I can barely tell the difference! And Aerosmith only ripped off white bands ripping off the blues, and never mined the blues themselves! And Run-DMC was totally unaware of the debt Aerosmith and hard-rock in general owed to black artists! How clueless of them! But that just made the irony all the sweeter!!!

So yeah. Don't bother seeking this out even for collection completion purposes. It is not worth money or time.

George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone: Essays

I really don't have to evangelize for Saunders' fiction, do I? He's done no wrong over the course of his three brilliant collections of short fiction (much of it SF) that are amazing in their constant reinvention of narrative voice and subtle and brutal and touching all at once, plus there's his fun children's book (which actually works as a children's book and isn't some smug exercise in simplification and talking down to the audience )about capitalism and selfishness and community, plus his even more fun children's novella about genocide. Don't take the MacArthur Foundation's word [1] for it: He's in the very topmost tier of contemporary writers. But here comes the question: do his strengths translate to the writer-sent-to-keenly-observe-some-event-or-phenomenon-and-relate-it-to-current-events-preferably-the-war-on-terror magazine essay form?

Well, I didn't really have to ask that question; first, because since Saunders has been sharing pretty much complete versions of pieces that ended up in this collection for the last couple of years at readings and, duh, yes, he is perfectly good at this; second, because there are only like three of those particular essays, dealing with a trip to Dubai, issues surrounding/individuals concerned with the U.S./Mexico border, and a curious possible miracle in Nepal, all of which are fine and make up about half the book; third, because this is actually a STEALTH SHORT-SHORT FICTION COLLECTION.

I'm talking about stories like this. Which, while "about" issues like politics and the media and current events, clearly do not fall even into the most liberal definition of "essay." Don't get me wrong; I'm glad to see them collected [2], even if "Woof" is probably the most ignorable piece he's written, and even the best of them (my vote probably for "Ask The Optimist!") proof that his being positioned (slash marketed) as this incredibly funny satirist of the absurdities of modern working life (as if he were writing "Dilbert" or something) is WRONG WRONG WRONG because I don't think anyone's reading a Saunders story and just laughing at each new sentence. He's not writing jokes (and when he does write jokes, they aren't great); the humor is clever and clever doesn't provoke LOTSA LAFFS and I'm always weirded out and uncomfortable around audiences who do get on the rofflecopter at that sort of thing, the people who laugh at every beat at an author reading and crack the fuck up at Magnetic Fields shows as if the use of irony or absurdity is equivalent to insincerity is equivalent to not to be taken seriously is equivalent to your subject is worthy of derision. I associate the impulse with a distrust of fiction and a misunderstanding of what it's capable of doing. With Saunders, the base-level funniness of the situations in his stories come inextricably intertwined with the fact that his characters are in often unbearably shitty circumstances leading them into moral crisis. His humor is the humor of friendship, the humor of the best sort of "you had to be there" storytelling -- it's fundamentally communicative, getting across what it's like to be in those circumstances without having to lose something important by relating it to your (the reader's) own personal experience.

Back to the collection, by far the strongest components are the essays of literary criticism [3], which yoke together praise for the virtues of Johnny Tremain, Slaughterhouse Five, Huck Finn, and Barthelme's "The School" into something approaching a coherent inclusive aesthetic for appreciating the many specific things good writing can do besides some nebulous concept of "making you a better person" or "broadening your horizons" -- an aesthetic that looks at writing on the basis of what it does and what it does to the reader, and not necessarily what it does *for* the reader. In the Vonnegut essay, he comes (came, really; it's in the past) to understand art as "a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. [...] What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit." I mean, he prefaces his look at the considerable virtues and (in his estimation) glaring and unignorable failings of Huck Finn after asking (and, implicitly, answering) "...the question of whether Huck Finn is indeed a Great Novel or if, on the other hand, the millions of people who have read and loved it and felt that it was morally important and gorgeous have all been stupid and deceived and hopelessly old-fashioned and dupable." Right there, he's reconfigured the whole stupid "standing the test of time" argument with the lasting popularity and the canon and the whatnot into something approaching a defensible position by taking the perspective of individuals finding something worthwhile in the work itself, and he proceeds to negotiate between the work's virtues and its flaws in a healthy, fruitful way.

So yeah. He's personal, but it's in the sense of communicating his personal reactions to stuff and examining why he had those reactions; when he feels something is vital or important, he does a good job of sharing both that sense of vitality or importance and, to the best of his own possibly half-understood reasoning process, why he feels that way. "Buddha Boy," despite being, you know, journalism, makes an excellent example for fiction writers: it contains neither a primer on the basics of Buddhist thought and history nor autobiographical data on Saunders' own interest in Buddhism and how he came to it and such, and yet those things are all implicit when he's talking about the government's oversight or grappling with what it would mean if the meditating boy actual is for real. When he describes the way he came to realize that Slaughterhouse Five is "not a recounting of Vonnegut's actual war experience, but a usage of it," that usage needs a lot of unpacking, and I don't want to quote the whole essay, so trust me when I say that Saunders practices what he preaches. It works.

[1] Not that their taste is suspect, though that reminds me that I'm due for a lengthy post on Lethem sometime soon.
[2] If only to ensure Saunders doesn't use them in one of his future collections proper.
[3] I say "criticism" even though he in most cases he has nothing but good things to say because it makes more sense to look at the act of criticism through the lens of "attempting to explain what works about this and what doesn't and why," rather than, you know, enumerating why you think something sucks.

Got to spend a rare evening with Denay and Meling, which, yay. Less yay was the fact that she was, in my personal and unvetted-by-her opinion, being dicked around by a guy she seems to like. Which is sad and she deserves better, especially when this guy is clearly the winner at life on paper and seemed cute and nice face-to-face until he started, well... QUICK QUIZ -- prospective boyfriend/slam-piece/whatever asks you to come to a bar with him. Dutifully following his directions even though it's hard to catch up to him (since he keeps squirming eel-like to various Mission drinking establishments, each more ironic than the last), you meet up with him, greet his friends, introduce him to your friends, etc. As the night passes and everyone appears to be having a good time, he proceeds to blatantly and for no discernable reason hit on your best (female) friend. When she gets uncomfortable and removes herself from the situation, he starts hitting on another female friend, and it becomes clear he's doing this entirely to get a jealousy reaction or something, even though you're not so much feeling jealousy as WHAT THE FUCK DUDE WHAT POSSIBLE REACTION COULD YOU BE GOING FOR. So the question is: can this in any way be considered to count as good-natured "negging" of the harmless flirtation type?

Let me put this another way: (Heterosexual) men of the world, if a nice lady is romantically and sexually interested in you, and you are romantically and sexually interested in her? This would be the opportunity to go for what you want. You play games when any or all of those quantities are unknown. OR WHEN YOU ARE TWELVE AND HAVE BEEN SOCIALIZED ENTIRELY BY CHILDREN'S HORROR FICTION AND SHITTY EPIC FANTASY

On the plus-ish side, I did get to meet and spend time with a number of good-natured stoner types and had to spend only a fraction of that time at a drum circle. One (of the stoners) was reading Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep; clearly he was the best. What I just finished:

Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, And Death: Folklore And Reality

Kelly Link recommended it, and she hasn't steered me wrong yet. Barber's study of burial practices, vampire folklore, and how the two relate (focusing mainly on Western traditions and especially on eastern Europe for obvious reasons but still touching on cultures worldwide) is well-researched, entertaining, and informative. Its major shortcoming is its length -- it's too short, and not in the "I loved this so much I never wanted it to end!" sense. The thing is, it's not an overview of vampire folklore, despite the vampire folklore analysis being the most compelling part of the work; it's a book-length essay coming up with a convincing argument for how the characteristics of decomposition (and body disposal and burial rites and disease epidemics and plenty more) provide real-life non-supernatural explanations for common story elements in vampire folklore (or more generally stories of the undead), and the folkloric examples are introduced to make or back up points of the argument.

The prose is often stilted and Barber can get a bit redundant at times, and not in the sense that academic writing sacrifices pleasure for precision, since the work's other problem is that the argument it makes is not quite complete (additional length may have helped here, too). The author takes a fully believable and backed-up explanation for human behavior: people's tendency to ascribe (malicious) intent or design to impersonal forces or random occurrences. So far all's well and good, and there's room for a few well-placed jabs at Creationists if I stooped to such cheap shots. But Barber generalizes this as universal within preliterate societies in a way that doesn't work for me for the same reason as that theory from like the late '70's wherein some guy argued that the ancient Greeks had no conception of internal consciousness and described their thought processes and all events that happened as entirely determined by the actions of the gods (so, for example, there's an archery contest and a guy shoots an arrow and misses the first time because he's eyed a scantily-clad hottie and is thinking of boning her but gets a bullseye on his second try. By this theory, he and his society would describe what happened as, like, Aphrodite sending lustful images to cloud his vision the first time but Ares or Apollo favoring him the second time and guiding his shot. Get the idea?). It's neat as metaphor, it's fertile story territory (try writing a narrator in that style!), but to convince me that the ancients actually did think this way, it would take considerable research to back up the assertion and examination of plenty of cases that would seem to indicate otherwise (such as every instance of Greek myth wherein someone thinks about stuff). In the Barber, enough of the argument (which I do find correct in its assessment and much of its conclusions) hinges on the people-ascribing-intent-to-random-death thing that by all rights it should be established in as much detail and with as many examples as the vampire folklore material itself.

There's also some hilarity in its dated (end of the '80's) assessment of popular depictions of vampires, concluding that vampires are getting portrayed identically everywhere and will probably become less popular with audiences because of their generic and formulaic portrayals BUT WAIT THERE'S THIS NEW BOOK BY SOME WOMAN NAMED ANNE RICE AND GET THIS IT'S ACTUALLY FROM THE VAMPIRE'S POINT OF VIEW!?!?!? AND HE'S THE MAIN CHARACTER!?!?!??!? what newfangled thing will they dream up next

In any case, I liked it much more than my quibbles might have you believe. Plus it has like six billion sources if you're interested in checking out revenant folklore in the aggregate.