So

Back page

For your amusement
Justin Mitchell · 26 June 2007

Following is a list of of the items that Guy took out of the box from KC:

1. Copy of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Poems of Robert Herrick.
2. Small cloth sack of old-fashioned licorice pillows.
3. Small Cardboard box, wrapped in tinfoil, of sour lemon drops.
4. Star cut out of piece of orange construction paper.
5. Copy of The Little Red Book of Baseball.
6. […]

This list is a bore to read but interesting enough to compile, based as it is on a hazy memory and on the imagination. You will see that what I am trying to do is set a tone so that the reader can determine the sort of home life from which Guy flung himself into booze and impotence. There are hundreds of things that might have served in the place of this arbitrary list of thirty. But one of the basic reasons for this list is to allow numbskull reviewers to tell their readers that it is merely an avant-garde convention, employed since Joyce. Further that the use of these lists is a method whereby the writer avoids the responsibility of narrative and plot. But this book has both narrative and plot. Subtly disguised, I grant you, but there. What they really loathe is prose. You remember prose? I’m rereading In the American Grain. You remember that book, right? You don’t remember that book. Well, you remember Herzog? Right! That’s a great book. All about America—the reality of America. I’m tired of all of you. Take the list or leave it. This book is for me. My next book will be a novel, for you, tracing the fortunes of a typical American family, from the years of Depression up through the Swinging Sixties. It will be written in Abracadabra, have a number of brutally candid sex scenes, and the hero will be an alienated Jew who likes to Suck Off Christian movie stars and Fuck black girls in the Ass. Confronting Contemporary America in a Big Way. There will be no plot and I will exhaust everybody in sight by listing, at every opportunity, the contents of anyone’s pockets and wallets and handbags. There will be an interesting scene detailing a luncheon between Wyndham Lewis (what?) and a Playboy interviewer¹.

I know what you’re thinking. Why bother assailing people for their stupidity? Such a tired, worn out critical cliche. Perhaps. But there’s no denying that it is in fact the critical endeavor and one which I rather enjoy. I don’t purport to be a genius, but lately I feel that I’ve been developing a better understanding of the creative impulses that spurred people like Beckett and Joyce. I think it’s lame to argue about what literary periods most resemble the present one. I’m lying. I just don’t know enough about history or care enough about politics to make a cogent case. I trust my intuition to finger the zeitgeist. So, there will be no citations or “evidence” to support anything I say here. We will simply trust that I am endowed with Tiresian foresight and not simply a classic narcissist laboring under the foolish assumption that his own neuroses are representative and insightful tools for cultural criticism (preemptively—even if I am, I submit that the world is made up solely of minds and their contents, so there!) Simply put: our times are utterly absurd. I’m talking absurd in that Nixon way (Damnit! No more appeals to history, I swear). It could be that New York City is rubbing off on me. By that I mean I have become a radical filter. A friend of mine suggested that this was a necessary condition of the city. Let us refine this: living in New York, with all its cumbersome abundance, makes you acutely aware of the sheer amount of waste large cities manage to accumulate. And you either sift through the waste or you reject it up front. Or at least that’s the sort of binary junk that forms the basis of most essays. And I’m not writing junk, so I’ll throw in a third option: surrender to diversion. This is a good one. Indeed it is probably the most popular choice. I surrender to diversion everytime I read the paper, watch television, flip tentatively through magazines, watch porn, get drunk, surf the internet, or stare at the yellow walls in my living room. Allow me to hit you upside the head with another manichaean supposition: there is only art or diversion (this is nothing more than a restatement of my previous formula). Take your pick. Most of us choose diversion, and understandably so. It’s easy. But this is an age old observation and a rather useless one, albeit not because of its antiquity. It is useless because it is necessary. Art is not for everybody. Literary bozos whining about how there’s no more audience. Another book or article about the importance of the novel. Some pedantic old bore importuning folks to be more literate, more human. Because Anna Karenina stifles all the pernicious impulses eating away at your precious humanity. Read more Plato, more Nietzsche and you won’t get cancer of the colon. Jane Austen is good for your eyesight. Camus relieves irritable bowel syndrome and despair. But mostly just irritable bowel syndrome. Enough. Beckett and Joyce saw with cold eyes. Everything was a prop, a target. I like that. I have developed an appreciation for the hat trick, the sleight-of-hand. Divestment. The only writing to be done now is workmanlike. Say to yourself, “What a fine object we have here.” Quite simply because waste is made without a sense of craft. That is the closest I will ever venture towards a manifesto. Who has the patience, after all for these thousand year old formulas. New algorithms, please.

¹ Excerpted from Gilbert Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Out of respect for your ignorance of the novel and your failure to fully understand the humor therein outside of context, I have shortened this rather hilarious list, which contains approximately 25 more items.

See also: first page, back pages, Video, about us, and our reading list.