The Contemporary Moment Or Whatever

All I want to do when I come home from work is sit down and hang out with Liz Lemon and some Chinese food.

Or, when I'm feeling more ambitious, just lay around and read David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, collected transcripts of his interviews with David Foster Wallace when DFW was on book tour in '96. Even though I'm sometimes irked by Lipsky's editorial interjections, when DFW starts talking all is forgiven. He's both really super smart and really egotistical; kind of a jackass and kind of a wunderkind. Charming and annoying. Which is the same experience I have reading his fiction and also somehow a combination I seem unable to resist. Which may or may not explain more about me than I would like it to. The two talk about everything from why books are important to how they are seductive and what makes them that way to masturbation and bachelorhood. Maybe about what you might expect but also way more interesting than you would think.

I'm also working through David Mitchell's new book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Reading Mitchell at the same time that I'm reading DFW is proving to be a heady combination, especially since DFW spends a lot of time putting his own writing in the context of postmodernism and literature after the rise of blockbuster movies and MTV specials. Which makes me think a lot about James Wood's frustrating review of Thousand Autumns in The New Yorker, in which he falls short trying to pigeon hole Mitchell's narrative into some kind of weird, prescribed idea of what contemporary fiction is or should be ("post-postmodernism" hoo-ha). Mitchell spoke really well about what fiction (even postmodernist fiction) should do—a) make you want to read & to empathize, b) be careful not to burst the little bubble of the story, or even the conceit of the story, for that matter—during his reading at the Brattle Theater a few weeks ago.

More later about the review, probably. I'm still mulling it all over and it feels important and there are things Woods suggests that just don't make sense on a fundamental level, if you want to talk about "the contemporary moment" in fiction or whatever.

At any rate, off I go to work more on my post-postmodernist historical fractured narrative nonsense. I even bought myself a fancy new writing desk—a real piece of furniture, not particle board or something I picked up off the street (which, by the way, is how I got my new end table). I feel about this writing table what most people might feel about a small dog. A really cute small dog. I spent most of the day it arrived just smiling and cooing at it. I may or may not have just given it a hug.