Form Follows .. well .. Form

A recent New Yorker fiction podcast of Salmon Rushdie reading Donald Bartholme’s story ‘Concerning the Bodyguard’ got me thinking again about form vs. content.  It’s a brilliant short story written almost entirely in the form of a series of questions.  There is a plot, but you have to read carefully to get it.  And you constantly ask yourself as you read why it’s written that way.  The story questions itself continuously as it unfolds.  Why is it written that way?  What does the form say about the meaning?  It is and it asks itself why it is all at the same time.  Unsettling,

I guess every story is in part about itself.  But I do miss the ability to take certain stylistic norms for granted.  Jennifer Egan’s latest story ‘Black Box’ in the sci-fi issue of The New Yorker is written as a series of tweets.  The New Yorker even tweeted it one tweet at a time.  (How else can one tweet?)  Cute.  Fun.  Self-referential.  Also very self-conscious and I guess that’s the part that I’d like to do without in the long run.  I’d like to think that there will be a consensus about what we’re doing here.  But that’s not the nature of our time.

Feeling old.  I can always read Cheever and Trevor stories for reassurance about form.  Not that their ideas and feelings aren’t troublesome at time.  They can be downright devastating, but they at least don’t seem to have questions about how to tell a story.  That they take for granted.

Well, I know how to prepare an entrée in the kitchen.  But then I go to WD-50 in NYC and I realize that if you’re willing to reshuffle the deck there’s a lot of fun to be had.  But when we go there we sacrifice the security of known conventions and forms.  When we create and make fun of ourselves at the same time we almost seem to be apologizing as we express.  Maybe I’m just a little old to be apologizing.

Sorry.

Double Exposure: Zion Redux

Nobody could ever accuse Philip Roth of holding back.  I’ve read most of his fiction, but missed ‘Operation Shylock’, from the early nineties.  Quintessential Roth.  At his best here.  A masterpiece of comedy and obfuscation.  Blurs the lines between truth and fiction, intent and accident, fantasy and reality, politics and the personal, religion and tribalism, psychology and delusion, literature and criticism, self and other.  Nobody does it better.  Hall of mirrors.  An acid trip without the chemicals.

Sure, there’s plenty in this work that I don’t even pretend to understand.  Nonetheless, I savor the dizziness that I’m caught in when I read it.  Yes, I don’t know shit.  And neither does anyone else.  Neither does Roth.  That much he makes clear.

Why no Nobel? Come on, Oslo. Get a life.

Nobody can riff like Roth.  He can take any event, any idea, any thought and improvise on it with energy that can only be described as sexual.  Paragraphs on a tiny thought.  Pages on a political point of view.  He can exaggerate with the best.  Better than the best.  Push it to the point of a verbal orgasm.  And then we sink back into fatigue, boredom, ‘reality’.  Waiting for the next touchtone of excitement which will get us back to that fevered pitch.   That place where nothing else seems to matter.  Where we’re blinded by verbal artistry and raw untermpered intelligence.  Only to get us back to the disappointing but real place where we realize ‘we don’t know shit.’  And then we start again, hungry for another moment of bliss.

If you’re sensitive on Middle East politics you might want to skip this.  Pretty raw exaggerations of any position imaginable.  No survivors.  None.

Yes, it’s outrageous.  It couldn’t be any other way.  I’m truly sorry that the point of view is so essentially male.  That alone has, IMHO, kept the Nobel away from Roth.  Just not sufficiently PC.  Well, screw PC. 

I read Roth in small doses.  Feels dangerous to do otherwise.  Might get swept up by the current.  Gotta hold it together.  But, God, what a genius.  I do so hope he will bless us with more fiction.