We're All Courtney Love Now

The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn’t realize was that those ideas and that urgency — and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head — could just disappear.

Because I haven't read much of anything on the Gawker network since Ana Marie Cox left for Time and stopped making dick jokes, I missed this now 2-year-old piece by blogger Emily Gould, whom I know mainly from her brief stint at GallyCat. The essay is confessional without being salacious, and it's interesting for how it discusses the relationship between one's personal life and writing. Writing can be away to escape a life of quiet desperation, or it can be an act of stepping over the line into loud, public desperation.

Prose Television

The Fiction Advocate has a nice little run-down of David Foster Wallace's 1990 essay, "E Unibus Pluram."

Brian's particularly interest in Wallace's take-down of what he (Wallace) calls "witty, erudite, extremely high-quality prose television." Brian writes, "If he were still alive, I would love to hear him pick apart the layers of irony in a show like 30 Rock, or a writer like Tao Lin."

I'm curious too, but I think it's worth pointing out just how self-conscious the essay is. Wallace rarely commented on his peers and only occassionally wrote about his forebears, but he was extremely aware of the weaknesses of his own writing, which he worried was shallow, cute, and primarily concerned with making himself look good rather than revealing deep truths. When he talks about "prose television," he's almost certainly referring to his own early writing, which explains the progression of his writing from the neurotic slapstick of The Broom of the System to more interior, increasingly discursive narratives like "Mr. Squishy."

If You Have Nothing Good to Say . . .

Yesterday, Goldman Sacks announced that they're making some very minor changes to their executive bonuses. Dennis Berman translates the text of their press release, which turns out to say very little. Normal corporate press releases explain what a company has done in plain English so that reporters can investigate and write them up for general consumption, but Goldman Sacks's press release does the opposite: it says very little in very complicated language. Tortuous language is often telling because it's a great tool for giving false impressions. Take, for example, Sarah Palin. Her reliance on empty buzzwords is not unlike Goldman Sack's use of vague legalese to hype an almost meaningless, one-time change in their bonus payouts. And yet, Palin has convinced many that she is knowledgeable on a wide range of issues, despite the fact that see seems to talk almost exclusively in prepositional phrases and dependent clauses. Similarly, Goldman hopes you think they're finally getting tough and tackling the serious problems in the way they do business and reward their employees and executives.

Quote of the Day

Laura Miller on evocriticism:

If sociobiology has yet to come up with a truly persuasive evolutionary explanation for homosexuality (and it really hasn't), then it's certainly not in a position to explain Shakespeare.

Put the Cobwebs Back in Place

Over at his new blog the Fiction Advocate, my friend Brian has a post about his distaste for instant memoirs.

I'm a bit hesitant to rebut Brian here. After all, despite having written and published one, I do find instant memoirs a bit gimmicky. Still, I think they're good exercises that teach writers to distill what's essential about their narrative, and in any case, I think Brian's argument needs some unpacking.

We dislike these instant memoirs because they are not long enough to be confessional or revelatory; because nobody is more than pruriently interested in the confessions of an unremarkable stranger, and because the internet makes these writers too self-conscious to be both honest and objective. The amount of contrivance that goes into an instant memoir brings it more in line with fiction than autobiography, and yet it’s a terrible kind of fiction, designed to make the writer sound witty, and to make a cynical reader chuckle, briefly. Instant memoirs do not set the record straight.

Earlier, Brian argues that instant memoirs "have more in common with the 'About me' paragraph on a MySpace page than with the literary form of the memoir," but instant memoirs bear a closer resemblance to the submissions at PostSecret, and at their best, they are inherently confessional.

According to Brian, instant memoirs are too short to be "revelatory," which is true to an extent. Some instant memoirs, however, can evoke recognition of shared experience. Instant memoirs may not be able to deliver the insight of longer narratives, but empathy itself is a kind of revelation.

As for contrivance, memoir has always been a dirty form of autobiography, and it pays to be skeptical of all narratives. What makes instant memoirs different?

It's unfortunate, that most instant memoirs are just plain awful, but the same can be said of any genre of writing. And yes, they are a bit too of-the-moment. Still annoying or not, they shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.