In a State of Hiraeth: Running to the Rock of Memories

There are places that bring you back in time. 

Not just hometowns, but much smaller spaces can do this. Even spots no more than twenty feet in diameter. They’re vantage points that let you realize that the view hasn’t changed, but the viewer has. You grasp the space differently, maybe more morosely, maybe more optimistically. But more importantly, you no longer can see things the same way that you once did. 

And when you’re in that pinpoint of space, you feel the pricks of time collide on the same plane. Four years ago, you discovered this place. Two and a half years ago, you brought a lover there. One year ago, you found solace there when nothing else helped. And now, you visit and it feels like ten years have past. Or the memories are happening all at once, and you're the outsider now.

I didn’t intend to find myself at such a place that Thursday night. I finished the work day late and missed another parkour meeting, so I thought the weeknight would be more book-filled and TV-ridden like usual.  

I did attempt that, but then I got restless. I wanted to run but run without knowing where I would end up.

At first, I tried exhausting myself on the run by jumping over the square islands on the sidewalks, untouched by cement where small trees or shrubs can grow. I jumped across dozens of them, partly to obliterate any linear path.

Soon I was in Berkeley, on College Avenue. Another two miles and I made it on campus. The impulse to jump and create zig-zag paths kept me all the way around campus just about, jumping on top of the pillars around North Gate, twisting through the metal art structures in the grass somewhat close to Mulford Hall, and jumping up the walls just outside the East Asian library. These were my feeble attempts at parkour.

But I couldn't stop running. From north side, I bumped into an old trail I’ve taken more times than it’s worth counting. With every familiar step, every sidewalk crevice and street intersection, it felt like greeting an old friend. I knew it that well. In the distance, I finally saw Indian Rock, appearing as a monolithic silhouette in the moonlight. I climbed up and had a familiar moment of breathlessness. San Francisco—the bridge, the city lights—all glimmered and reflected in the bay’s rippling shadows, faintly moving. The lights were the blood cells to a city’s non-stop bloodstream of traffic, of day, of night life. Beautiful. 

As I stared out, I realized that, hey, I’m still here. I’m still in the bay area after college. But I felt like a ghost treading paths once taken by a guy who already had felt like a ghost in his senior year, spending many, many nights and weekends on a thesis that took more time per week than a part-time job. And in the last three weeks before graduation, that was with a part-time job too. (Well, paid internship.)

Graduation has come and gone. May 18^th is a beautiful memory. Now college is my synonym for “hiraeth.” The Welsh word cannot be translated directly into English but it comes down to mean homesickness for a place that cannot be returned to. And even the first time I stepped on campus after I graduated, it was different. This may sound sad but the first thought was: This place is no longer directly relevant to my life.

I spent four years within these walls forgetting about life afterwards, giving myself time to forget time was passing. A black hole stared at me whenever I had thought about life after graduating. It was never relevant. That is, until job searches began last January.

Now I’ve arrived on the other side of the black hole. But there hasn’t been any arrival. I’m in my second job, I’m living in Oakland, life is good, but there’s a plague of emotional residue whenever I think of college. Maybe I ran at night to Indian Rock, with its view of the bridge and city lights, to wonder why I see the lights but still cannot accept them as any Gatsby green light, any symbolic hope or epitome of the American dream. Restlessness is all.

           

Cal Running Club
(Photo Courtesy of Alex Wang)

Seeing the Space Shuttle

It’s funny how I feel anchored to memories more than dreams these days, especially when sitting on this rock that's been the place of running club rest stops and old romances and adventures. I watched the Endeavor Space Shuttle return from orbit from this rock in September 2012. I heard one of the most beautiful instruments from this rock—a halo, appropriately named. Cal Running Club members, myself included, were randomly interviewed once by two high school girls about why we—the running club—came to this rock. And when I needed to run away, just for a little while, it was—quite literally—the rock I could relie upon. It was as much a part of my Berkeley life as my overstuffed notebooks, the goofy and beautiful memories, and the diploma were. 

I guess I still have my eye on the back window of my life, watching closely as time moves me away from the life I knew as a student. I watch things drift farther away. It's harder than it ever was to keep my eyes on the road in front, in North Oakland, but my eyes keep lingering back to Berkeley. Oh, retrospection makes authors of us all, it's just how many times we reread our unwritten stories to ourselves that determines how much the past affects us. 

Strangely, after leaving the rock, taking the BART night train back, and letting the last edges of hiraeth ebb away, I fell asleep almost instantly at 11pm—my earliest bedtime in months.

Running and Clutter: My Opposites

     Stop reading. Right now. Push yourself up from your chair and walk around the room. Count to ten before coming back. Be uncluttered. I’ll still be here, trust me.

     Now I’ll begin. I read a New York Times opinion article called "The 'Busy' Trap" recently and it made me think about something that I’d like to call “busy thinking.” A few years ago, I thought that I could use every leisure minute to think of future responsibilities, new projects, new ways to organize, essay brainstorming, and other ways to utterly abandon the present moment. This was my definition of productivity my sophomore year.

     Side-note: This was before I lightened up and watched an episode of The West Wing the night before an essay was due because I felt like it and, quite frankly, that essay deadline could go to hell. Right then at least. My high-school serious-study self had always thought my dad was wrong. His college strategy of playing ten minutes of arcade pinball per every fifty minutes of studying seemed like a waste of time. I finally learned he was right. 

     But back then, I would try to skip breaks. To consider the counterarguments of Descartes’s “cognito ergo sum” and then jump to another topic and another, while on a 6-mile run. That's how I justified the 6-mile run, in some small way at least. I filled my head with something else to keep busy. I would also start cleaning projects, or organizing computer files but jump to another thing and another without finishing anything—or at least slowing completion. I abandoned trains of thoughts without a station in sight. It wore me down. This multi-tasking frenzy was a mental drag, a symptom of procrastination, and a delusion shielding me from priorities.

     On Monday morning this week, with a to-do list of eighteen items from putting up my window blinds (move-in time!) to grocery shopping (after all, Monday is my Saturday, as far as my work schedule goes), I spent more than half the morning on the internet without meaning to. I mean, I put the window blinds up and I did ab work. Combined, that’s forty minutes. But that’s part of three hours that it took before I went onto the next item on the list, which was running. I still hadn’t eaten breakfast. Yet I had been so “busy.”

     I felt that this time-consuming internet loop of going article-to-article or Youtube video-to-video or Facebook-newsfeed-scrolling was really similar to that sophomore “busy thinking” experiment. Except this was addicting and intentionally non-productive. I still felt mental drag by the end, and I realized that it was the self-imposed clutter that bothered me, not the tasks themselves. And the more clutter I focused on, the less productive my day was going. Even my 18-item list served as evidence.

Running Out of the Frame

     So finally I went for my 6-mile run. My brain relaxed into a healthy rhythm. Spending forty-four minutes exploring my new neighborhood of North Oakland was one way to look at it, but another was that I was meditating. Which, technically, I was.

     Tim Kreider, the writer of the New York Times article, describes idleness in a productive way, as “not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets.” He doesn’t mean idleness so much as meditative activities, or things that let you accept absence from busyness.

     Running is my vacation. My meditation. From work, from stress, from normal life weighed down by time and responsibilities—and from mental clutter. Another way to term the dilemma that Kreider’s article discusses is this environment-induced clutter—even in the non-work setting: too many TV shows to watch, too many posts to read online, too much to think about. Social media, facebook, reddit, they’re great. But there is a point when that five minutes on a website reaches an hour marker we didn’t mean to reach.

     And we check Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram again and again, when we have free time. Self-control is battling real-time social stimuli. I get onto BART, boredom settles in like a bad smell, and I pull out my phone, almost instinctively. But am I also checking my phone at dinner with my parents between sips of wine? Then I worry when others aren’t doing it constantly too. The girl I liked didn’t respond to my text. That must mean she doesn’t find me interesting. When did we start believing that real-time messaging had to have the same social cues as real conversations? And when did our online identities start catching up to our real ones?

     I admit that some of this residual resistance to technological leisure binging and cluttering is from the years long ago when I had to mute commercials and could only watch an hour of television if I read two chapters of a book.

One New Message...

     But the internet has the power now to clutter our lives and we let it. I sometimes try to go online just to do one quick search. Oh but there’s a picture of a cute animal on someone’s Facebook wall and a new movie trailer and a new song and… It turns into the grocery-store dilemma: I leave a while later realizing I didn’t get the one item I came into the store to get.

     So I run. It’s impossible to clutter that space of time with anything else. Even my perception of time changes. It becomes measured by strides and breaths—it feels excitingly primitive, as if I can determine the duration of a second as fast or slow. I can go anywhere, to the edge of the Bay or to the Berkeley hills or through a hidden alley between houses. Time and space become relative to my pace.

     I still return to the internet. I like the addicting “busy thinking” done for me, with so many options to shift my attention to all the time. I don’t want to be unplugged. It’s the Matrix I agree to be part of. Kreider calls American busy-bodies “addicted to busyness and dread what they might to face in its absence.” It seems like that even in our down time. Especially in our downtime. My remedy for absence is to embrace it, which naturally happens on a long run.

     But I like the clutter too. Just, why exactly do we return to the clutter of articles, posts, newsfeed, tweets? Is it because so quickly we miss it? Or because we need it?

A Coemdy of Typos

Has anyune ever thought to blog typs? Probably. But it’s stupdi. I mean why waste anyone’s time tring to intentionaly mess up whow you write…well why not? Just for now. Lets’ make bady written jokes!

Wanna be a millionaire oversight? Well, you’d oversee millionaires.

Remember that human mind sometimes switches off “the”’s mid-sentence.

To be ornot to be? I don’t know why Ornot must be asked that twice.

Don’t you hatove when people make up new words? Me to.

If it’s not meant to be pauses should happen after “be” like commas or something otherwise the whole rhythm of the subordinate “if” clause is thrown off.

Do yu have fat finger? That’s another word for typo-maker.

“Stanfurd” is actually not a typo, it’s a cult. Go beers!

Hey lookat theese stars** aren’t they just beautiful**and ****in the*way

You; pause; like me! Because semi-colons are like the following;

“Then go home and write about it; BLOGGER -Lonely Island

You know I once thought about hitting up a pubic relations specialist, but then I did a double take.

Is this typo likeable or is it…likable? Am I right or am I right?

And miles to go before I sheep, and miles to go before I sheep…ba.

Bringing sexy bag.

That lass one is a homophone, not homoprone.

You know the literary cannon is quite explosive.

Bing it on. Oh God, that’s a real phrase. But please Google it.

Learn on me. If you’re not strong, I’ll be your...and sexual implications just turn on.

Tina Tuner was the best thing that happened to my guitar.

Funny how letters can slip in when you write, but that’s all in the pabst now.

Wii are the champions.

Don’t ever change, she ejaculated to the nudist colony. Oops, Freudian sex.

Life is a misERy. all Caps is really sudden when it HAPPENS.

How cut the cheese? How now.


Drop it as it’s hot just don’t got the same ring.

Youre wonders why this is a boring typo. What can he say? His first name is Youre.

Atack is on the wall. Do you see it pinned?

Boties are cool. –drunk Doctor Who at the bar with the ladies

Will I finally get to eat dinner? Spoon enough.

Isnt it weird when there are just just repeated words?

Let’s…put a bunch…of…dramatic…punctuation…andthencondensewords!

Sam yelled at me, “spencer…spencer,” but I didn’t hear him. Then he said, “Spencer” and I paid attention,

Have ya ever been told “God luck” yet? It’s a great feeling.

This is a bog and I’m blogging. But I’m not the weatherman.

This is litterly trash.


Sinning off,
Spenser

P.S. You have smore typo-jokes? Coment below!

The English Major Is Not Dead

          I was driven to write this because of a New York Times editorial that came out recently. It’s entitled "The Decline and Fall of the English Major," but what it should be called is “The Decline and Fall of the Faith in the English Major”. I admit that the writer makes a valid point: statistics and records do show the diminishing numbers of people graduating with undergraduate degrees in English, from Pomona College, from Yale, from all over. The writer, Veryln Klinkenborg, goes on to mention how even those who do become English majors end up in her nonfiction writing courses she’s taught at various Ivy League schools without the ability to write clearly or even “humanely.” (I assume by that she refers more to the elegance of civilized writing than to any notion of brutality.) I would say that the English major does foster writing skills but does so more idiosyncractically, more as an independent study than an explicit class or focus. I appreciate the article’s insistence that writing skills should be more pronounced for English majors, but I think it goes too far to call the major at its “fall,” or dead.

          Ultimately, I think the opinion is a dramatic one, but it has its merits. The article makes a good point about the move toward “literal-mindedness” in regard to the contemporary student’s approach to the humanities, but I would term it a bit more like obsessive rationalization. There is a self-conscious process of doubting and then searching for how exactly the English major can, and must in this economy, be a practical field of academic study. The answer to this would be the development of better writing skills, and I would agree that it is not the norm for tips about clear writing styles to be discussed by a professor who, for instance, is more concerned with covering a deconstructionist reading of Joyce’s Ulysses than trying to teach a lecture hall the arguable sin of split infinitives. English courses are not writing courses, but that said, the process of writing essays is the field from which better writing sprouts. It isn’t exactly or explicitly taught. The craft of writing is inevitably a personalized skill and any formula to help improve one’s writing has its limits like anything else. It’s much the same about what one hopes to get out of a humanities degree—the ability to read critically and write argumentatively without following just one style or one teacher or one news source. No one can teach you to stand your ground but yourself.

          This doesn’t mean that being an English major means one won’t improve his/her writing. I, for one, can attest to the incredible significance that writing—and writing better—takes when one decides to do an honors thesis (but even a thesis on a smaller scale would make one grow as a writer). My professor at UC Berkeley insisted that clear writing and clear thinking are inextricably linked, but his pedagogical bent was to help out purely with the writing by fixing syntactical or stylistic difficulties. I thought it was horrifying at first. Here I was writing on postmodern metafiction and I had come to his office hours seeking some solace and hope that my argument was an argument. And what happens? He points to the page. The topic sentence here rambles on. He points to the next paragraph. This is unclear. He turns the page. That has a dangling modifier and you can really cut half this sentence out. Those were the questions asked and the comments given, which were galaxies away from the ones I was expecting: So how does this text account for others like it, etc.? Your point relates to Linda Hutcheon’s theory of metafiction, but how does it differ, etc.?

          As much as I disliked this method initially, I actually came to realize that it was the change in my writing style that helped change my analyses and even build my confidence in my thesis. Shorter sentences gave me more momentum and clearer progressions of thought on the page. Once I had adjusted to simpler syntax, I could go back and diversify sentence structures without feeling obliged to fit in everything in stringy mega-sentences or one-page paragraphs. I didn’t realize how much they had weighed down the page until I got rid of them. My enjoyment of writing the thesis also went up exponentially—I was flying over the multiple planes of theories, texts, and postmodern wordplay when before I was running myself into tunnels of complex-compound sentences at every turn.

          So from personal experience, I have to say that I was lucky enough to have my honors thesis professor, as well as a few other professors, who did deviate from lectures and literary theory occasionally to make the class write and write outside the box of formulaic or habitual styles. Even still, talking about writing styles and processes is abstract. Writing is the only way to improve writing. And what you read may inspire you to write in a certain way. What this article addresses is that more and more English majors fall into the form of theoretical discourse as they write, the ability to “assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax.” They are so equipped with artilleries of jargon that they begin firing off impressive terms without waiting to set up the proper contexts or considering how best to present them and so these terms fall to the ground as meaningless bullets in an obscure mist of language.

          The funny thing is, the article writer talks about how the English major should both be much more idealistic, in offering a romantic vantage point over the sea of human experience, and be more practical, in sharpening writing skills. I feel like that’s too much to hope for. A lot of people grab for movies and music before books nowadays, and that’s part of the reason why the English major isn’t what it once was. Books as forms of entertainment and enlightenment have short-circuited a bit in society and the warm yellow glow of the layman’s and the scholar’s lamps have been somewhat replaced by the fluorescent bulbs of competing theorists, critics, and reviewers’ operating tables. Those tables are not bad or evil or contemptible—they’re just simply more closed off to the public than literary theory and literature once was.

          The contemporary English major has to try his best to bridge the gap between theoretical jargon and clear speech, which isn’t exactly a picnic in the park. At the same time he faces the societal bias against the humanities and the lie that it’s “useless.” Now I have nothing against computer science majors, chemistry majors, econ majors, or business majors—to name a few of the more technical ones that can lead straight to specialized careers—but just because English and other humanities majors help answer the “why” of language and human experience instead of the “how,” they appear less practical and not worth the money when it’s just not true.  

UC Berkeley English Commencement Ceremony ~ May 18, 2013

          I have the greatest urge to get into all the benefits of being an English major and how the decline and its “fall” is not about the value of a degree in literature but about the perception of that value, but I won’t. This reflection-essay was meant as a mere facebook response to a post by a former roommate of mine about this New York Times article and look what happened. I do want to finish by saying that it is true that writing is not an explicit art taught in the humanities so much as it is an independent process of self-discovery, influenced by the readings and the professors one encounters. So it would be nice if more stylistic tips were taught. Theoretical jargon filters in more and more as praiseworthy and useful (which it is, up to a point), yet it does thicken the atmosphere away from clear essay language. Apart from the quest to have better writing, what a major in literature does is increase empathy and comfort about life’s inevitable uncertainties, as can be seen from this recent psychological study on just reading fiction. In conversation with this is a statement from the commencement speech of a fellow English major Prachi Naik, who was in my honors thesis class (the rest can be found here):

Because we chose poetry over pipettes, we might somehow [appear to] be less hire-able, have less to contribute to the market. It’s not enough that we’ve enlarged ourselves through the hugeness of human empathy that reading literature requires, or that we’ve sharpened our words, our vocabulary, our rhetoric so that we can excavate, along with so many who came before us, what it means to be fully human.

    The English major is not dead. It just needs another chance.

Pre-Post-College Post: AAAH!

           You know, I’m going to be really dramatic: Life decisions are flashing before my eyes. I was asked by my brother’s friend Mitchell the other day what I was going to do after graduation. The answer? I. Have. No. Idea.

            You think I’m kidding? Ha, wait ‘til I tell you. I’m typing this up on a beautiful sunny day in Sacramento, California, with seven Callisto tabs opened up on my Google Chrome browser. (Callisto is the UC Berkeley job search website.) I’m choosing between applying to be a legal assistant or a marketing intern or an art management fellow or something else entirely. Something more to do with writing in the job description maybe. I am throwing mud on the wall and you know the worst of it is that in order to apply somewhere, I need to truly, sincerely convince myself. That’s a personal must. To break this down, I’ll go: first, the company or firm has an opened position and the publicity manager or secretary is trying to convince you to apply with a snazzy job description; second, I take it in and then question the reason why we have jobs, why I am questioning this, and why I have a need to want a job besides the money. (The answer? A bigger purpose, ultimately.) So it comes down to the question of the stepping stones.

            There are four or six—thousand—stepping stones—well, since you visually only access the ones on a job search page, let’s limit the stones to, oh wait, there are a few thousand job results, never mind—in front of you. Life moves only forward so you must go on one of them. But which one? The big spiked log from Temple Run 2 is suddenly coming up from behind you and you realize the ground is trying to drag you backwards and so you LEAP! (The equivalent: you apply to several jobs.)

           Okay, you leap. That’s where I am, the moment before the leap. But let’s say no acceptances come back and maybe you apply and apply again—now I will switch back more consistently to first-person—and eventually you, I, will hear back. If a position is on the table, is it enough to pay rent? To stay in Berkeley or Oakland, let alone San Francisco? And enough for living expenses per week? Per month?

           Most of the friends I’ve talked to are going home to regroup for a little while after they graduate. I have this as Plan C or D right now, I’m not even sure which one. (Note to self: Man, you’ve gotta decide on the order of your plans.) But again, life choices at the first stepping stone post-college are flashing before my eyes and I have to take the leap forward to avoid being crushed by that Temple Run 2 spiked log called Time-Rent-and-Living-Expenses.

          Let’s get down to the bottom of this. I don’t know what to do because I know of so many possibilities. Maybe that’s what multi-tasking and college life do to you. For instance, I’m not just an English major and rhetoric minor, but a leader on a Comparative Literature Symposium team and an academic student journal; and writing a thesis on metafiction that takes up enough time to be considered a part-time job. Or more, when the due dates are looming. (And don’t forget interning and training for the SF June marathon.) Inevitably, most of this will vanish into thin air, into the past with the label (hopefully) “accomplishment” in two months but in my mind, the thesis—on top of the other responsibilities—will be the challenge of my academic lifetime come to an end. Not in sadness or nostalgia but as simply an end that opens up for something new, something only vaguely related to what came before.

           But what?

P.S. I just told my dad I don’t know what jobs to “audition” for. I think my acting class is getting to me too. 

Hectic Poetics: A Blurb About Reading Poetry

Erase the idea that poetry is gentle and kind. Or that the soft iambic beat will always make you weep…none of that crap. [Analysis of last line: “Or THAT…you WEEP”: iambic foot, “NONE of”: trochaic foot, “THAT CRAP”: spondaic foot]  

But maybe I should start by saying that I write this post to those that don’t come into constant contact with poetry—and I write as a student re­newed to the art form. Nothing’s polished, nothing’s the word of God.

But, “Yes, be like God.” (--Jack Spicer from “Imaginary Elegies IV”)

            Dickinson was a pro at compression. Is it silence, reticence, or suppression behind those dashes? And Poe wrote “The Raven” completely in trochaic meter. That’s why we feel the weighted lull. Was there a Barney-Stinson-“Challenge-Accepted!”, arrogant motivation behind it or was it his way into the sonic portrayal of the dead-weight of depression?

            But those are the revered masters of old. I want to bring up modern poetry, where language we hear every day becomes a soundboard of idiomatic, pun-ic, or otherwise clever wordplay. Rhyme is not always at the end of the line (and not even always similar sounds! This blog title is an example of a sight rhyme), sound patterns exist beyond rhyme, line cuts afresh, meter is mixed in mad, mad squalls, and all and all…

          Digression: To answer the question, can’t you just stress any word the way you want? Simple answer: no. A word is never alone; it must be read in context to determine its metrical identity, but interestingly, some words actually tend to be stressed always. “All” is such a word. Consider the phrase “And all that jazz.” It’s “and ALL that JAZZ” since you’d be forcing it too much to say “AND all THAT jazz,” know what I mean?

          Now the line: how is poetry and prose distinguished? A quick and dirty answer is the line. Yes, there are prose poems, but that form is itself a deviation from the poetry’s formal structure in having lines. All poetry carries patterns of some sort, whether in the repetition of the “r” sound in every line to a more obvious one like iambic tetrameter. But the line matters. The left and right margins help splice meanings, making the sentence and the line different or similar entities.

          Example: here is an unbroken phrase: “under the surge of the blue mottled clouds”. It’s nice but the two adjectives “blue” and “mottled” seem clunky, not smooth.

          Now here is the phrase put back in its context of William Carlos Williams’ “Spring and All”:

                                             “under the surge of the blue

                                               mottled clouds”                      (lines 2-3 of the poem)

The word “blue” now rings with ambiguity, making us see it as a noun [technically, a metonymy standing in for “sea”; metonymy: the attribute “blue” stands for its object “sea”] and then once we get to the next line, we see it as an adjective for “clouds”. The line separation makes the meaning of the phrase less clear intentionally. Maybe the first line should be read independently of the second line? It can be, since no interpretation is the absolute truth in art, but we generally wouldn’t since the next line fits so well into the meaning of the phrase overall. Still, the enjambment—the line break after “blue”—lets in a moment of semantic intensity.

         I originally wrote this blog entry two months ago but never finished it—it’s spring break and what the hell, so here is a blogged blurb about reading poetry. And the thing about poetry is innovation of form. Say “I love you” without saying it in words—use the form. Or obscure horizons of meaning like this:

and all the knights were blue

skies naked of silver

and all the night skirts blew

silver naked of skies

Poetry should still make sense grammatically, which is the key part to writing it. Not all sentences will be entirely complete or entirely correct grammatically but they will make sense and follow grammatical patterns. The cheeky example above may not have capital letters to begin but there is still syntax, still structure. The anaphora (the repetition of "and" in the beginning of the lines) structures the way lines one and three work to distinguish the separation of the first two lines from the latter two. There is also the play with homonyms (blue-blew and knight-night) and “silver” as a metonymy for swords (4th line) and for stars (2nd line). Yes, I just wrote that example because you know what, it doesn’t matter how bad a poem is so long as you read and write poetry to mess with form and take it for a walk without the stroller. In art, form drives meaning, form is meaning. The question “What does a poem mean?” need not apply—there is no meaning apart from form when it comes to art. Experience form unbounded from the cradle of conventional uses of language. And enjoy the ride.

A Brush With Metafiction on NPR

12:40 PM February 13, 2013

Like any student who decides to take a break on his laptop, I checked the internet.

         But something was different about this break from writing my thesis on postmodernist metafiction (via Flann O’Brien and Gilbert Sorrentino): I came across a book review on npr.org of Percival L. Everett’s book Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. Mr. Everett is a distinguished professor at the University of Southern California, but it was the book review’s title that drew me in: “Lost In Everett’s Hall of Metafictional Mirrors.” Yep, the word screamed to me. METAFICTION!! ON NPR!

          From the get-go, it was obvious the author of the review, Alan Cheuse, found metafiction unproductive and negatively destructive to a novel. He called it “distracting,” going so far to say that the “metafictional asides and intrusions clog the flow of the story and drag down what might have been a fine novel about fathers and sons”—whoa, slow down. So metafictional interruptions all of a sudden ruin a book?

          I disagree.

           Just looking at Everett’s father-character’s view of postmodernism (the main playing grounds of metafiction), which the article provides, tells something of why metafiction enhances the experience of reading:

At one point, the Everett character asks what thing in his father's career irked him the most. "Son, it was being called a postmodernist," the father answers. Elaborating, he maintains he doesn't even know what that means. "Some asshole tried to explain it to me once, said that my work was about itself and process and not about objective reality and life in the world."

"What did you say to him?" the son asks. "I asked him what he thought objective reality was," the father replies. "Then I punched him."

          Laughter. The father’s ending gesture is unexpected, but it’s also funny because punching someone, like writing a “postmodernist” text, definitely can be one way to experience “objective reality” (even that phrase is ironic, but I digress). (All right, here goes my digression: The thing is, objective reality is a sham. Always has been. As much as a psychological phenomenon or perception can be statistically proven or approximate in a great many people said to represent populations, subjectivity always has its place. Cultural collectivity is a thing, but all cognitive understanding registers behind two eyes. No view’s identical. This may be common sense, but hey, I was digressing.)

           (And now, transitioning from the digression:) Metafiction comes across to this reviewer as negatively destructive. Oh, there’s no doubt that it’s destructive. But look at popular Youtube videos or modern blockbuster movies: the hyper-shifting frames are destructive as well, aren’t they? Your attention is destabilized momentarily. And you like that. Keeps you interested.

            Sure, if you feel like criticizing my analogy, a metafictional event causes an ontological leap from the book to the real-time experience of the author writing or the reader reading, not a shifting frame within a narrative (big difference), but again, isn’t that interesting? Fun?

             But what isn’t fun is how the article ends:

If only this new novel had deployed more of that punch!

              Yeah, the writer of this article ends with a “punchline,” but he missed the joke. Metafiction is liberating, funny, even intimate. You (yes, my reader, YOU) lift off with the author into a moment of reflection, like in this NPR excerpt below when the father in the book says,

It's called fiction, son. This is the story you would be writing if you were a fiction writer.

It's depressing.

You're damn right it's depressing. You're not very bright, are you?

What am I supposed to do with this?

Finish it.

               Suddenly one’s concern for the dying father changes into a brush with the author’s process. “Depressing” becomes possible commentary from the author, but more interestingly, the last command, that could be told to any struggling or accomplished writer, enforces the importance of this story: “Finish it.” The insistence is right in front of you. So clearly. So clean. You feel the jolt of motivation about the writing itself. A motivation that makes you keep reading, perhaps.

               The bottom line is this, metafiction (which I never really defined, I’m sorry—it’s textual self-consciousness, or books that are self-conscious) intentionally distracts us and puts us into a language game of Wittgenstein’s or a dialogic carnival of Bakhtin’s.

                It’s an intellectual text-game, and a reflective moment, that turns people either sour or startled—or smiling.

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http://www.npr.org/2013/02/13/171482592/lost-in-everett-s-hall-of-metafictional-mirrors