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Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Noah Cicero Interview
First, since I’m pushing his post off the top with this one, I would like to recommend the Rolando Perez essay Daniel links below. Please discuss in Daniel’s comment box.
Second, it used to be I wrote the longest blog post. I broke 10,000 words once. Something about comics; maybe philosophy. But Tao Lin’s interview with Noah Cicero is 20,000+ and I read it straight through. The Grumpy Old Bookman likes Cicero’s Burning Babies
UPDATE: I see that the publisher has a note, just up today, announcing that the Burning Babies release is delayed, but offering a discount.
Comments
(From the interview): “Jack London in the story The Call of The Wild had the same contradiction. He was an actual Social Darwinist, a racist and all that shit.”
Paging SEK ... SEK, your thesis anecdote is ready, please pick it up.
Rich, I haven’t made it that far down in the interview yet. I’m still reading some of his book reviews and, to be honest, don’t know what to make of him. His attack on Dave Eggers (whose short stories I admittedly don’t like, but whose Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and articles I’ve liked:
Yes, you can tell when you read Eggers writing that he spent at least five minutes on every line to make sure it sounded pretty, didn’t make sense, and conveyed nothing.
Eggers, with his divine intelligence is saying that the Children’s War, slavery, racism, steel and coal miners working for script, both World Wars, and all the horrible shit that humans have
ever done to each other would never have happened if they just read his $22 book and knew God was the Sun.
Don’t know what to make of him? In my opinion, he looks like a classic American autodidact. There is an amazing freedom in half-understanding a lot of different concepts that you’ve picked up whenever you had time. When the writer is good, it tends to make prose like his—any three paragraphs taken together are interesting and (as John says) provocative; the whole thing doesn’t really hold together.
I suppose some of the errors seemed too calculated at first: “Ophra” for “Oprah,” the bit about Kanye West at the football game, &c. They could be mistaken for the very cleverness he claims to hate. For a second there I almost wondered whether he wasn’t the concoction of the McSweeney’s crew, an in-joke I wasn’t in on. (This may also be a product of the cold medication...or the Good Lord’s way of telling me I ought not read while stuffed full of it.)
Thanks John Holbo for linking and writing a little bit about it.
I’m not a concoction of McSweeney’s, that is funny as hell though that you thought that.
What can I say, Noah? Sudafed plus two nights tossing minces even the best minds; now you’ve seen what it does to mine. Quick question: Would you be offended if I bombarded you with questions soon as my head clears? (As John says, you’ve written some damn provocative material.)
i am going to respond to all you people’s comments in the comment’s section of the actual interview
go there to discuss things, so that you can more easily refer to what was said in the interview
i will respond there soon
[I’m reposting the comment I just wrote over on Tao’s blog here, just in case the Blogger-phobic among you want to continue the conversation.]
Tao and Noah,
I hope you don’t mind if I call you by your first names. There are a number of issues I want to talk about, but the format makes it difficult. Y’all cover so much ground in the interview it’s difficult to know where to start. So I’ll be a little random:
Noah, when you talk about London and Social Darwinism, I understand why you’d think that, but the situation’s much messier than you’d think. London’s beliefs didn’t belong to any school of social Darwinists, because no such beast existed. (I mid-stride a dissertation on this topic, and am more than happy to elaborate, if you’d like.) That’s particularly true for a writer like London whose thought is riddled with contradictions: one day he’s a Nietzschean, the next an acolyte of Herbert Spencer, the next a devout socialist, &c. He’s the model of philosophical inconsistency most of us follow, wittingly or not.
Which brings me to this:
I would like to say also that a person cannot like Foer and Easton Ellis at the same time. They contradict each other philosophically too much.
I don’t follow, partly because I don’t think many people are themselves philosophically consistent, so they may read Foer to flatter one set of convictions and Ellis another. Also because I think (in Ellis’ case, at least) there’s been a real evolution to his thought from novel to novel; if you buy that a writer’s philosophical positions can evolve, then you have to acknowledge the fact that author’s names don’t attach themselves to monolithic schools of thoughts but to a mind continually changing. An example based on one of yours:
Jack London wrote two different versions of “To Build a Fire.” The first one, published in 1902, ends like this:
In a month’s time he was able to be about on his feet, although the toes were destined always after that to be very sensitive to frost. But the scars on his hands he knows be will carry to the grave. And—“Never travel alone!” he now lays down the precept of the North.
The second one--the famous one--published in 1908 ends like this:
Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known. The dog sat facing him and waiting. The brief day drew to a close in a long, slow twilight. There were no signs of a fire to be made, and, besides, never in the dog’s experience had it known a man to sit like that in the snow and make no fire. As the twilight drew on, its eager yearning for the fire mastered it, and with a great lifting and shifting of forefeet, it whined softly, then flattened its ears down in anticipation of being chidden by the man. But the man remained silent. Later, the dog whined loudly. And still later it crept close to the man and caught the scent of death. This made the animal bristle and back away. A little longer it delayed, howling under the stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky. Then it turned and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food-providers and fire-providers.
I doubt the people who thought the second “the scariest story they have ever read” would’ve said the same thing about the first. But something happened to London in the intervening years, a shift in philosophical position (which, initially at least, improved the quality of his work). So there’s that. (Make of it what you will.)
The other thing that struck me in your conversation is all the talk about “your literary voice.” I’ve been thinking (and writing) about Don DeLillo lately. I can’t stand him because (to summarize the thousands of words I’ve poured on this problem) everyone in his books sounds like him. Now, there’s something to the idea of capturing the sound of a particular pattern of speech, the way say Faulkner captures that Mississippi/Louisiana accent (that’s where I’m from, and of all the “Southern” writers I’ve read, no one had a better ear for the Southern tongue than Faulkner). But if you notice, despite the fact that Faulkner writes “Faulknerian” prose, his characters rarely sound like each other; you can tell that he listened to how the people around him spoke and struggled to find some way to put that to page. What concerns me with the way that you’re talking about “the literary voice” and your alternative to it, I can’t help but wonder whether you’re just replicating the problems you want to solve, only in the language you’re comfortable with.
In other words, how do you balance refining your voice with representing other people’s? What if you’re writing about someone whose tone indicates that they are, in fact, announcing or explaining or declaring or proclaiming or avering or claiming or whatnot? For one, in this comment I feel like I’m somewhere between “explaining” (the London stuff, and sorry if I sound didactic, I don’t mean to) and “rambling.” If you excise both of those from your working vocabulary, won’t you be misrepresenting the way people speak? Like when I read that excerpt, Noah, about the crack-heads, I thought they seemed more mild than any of the crack-heads I’ve known, and I think part of the reason is that the dialogue hangs there; it’s effective as a way of conveying how the narrator’s calmly interacting with the crack-heads, and that’s the flat prose you’re aiming for, I gather. But I still think it doesn’t capture the crack-heads, or makes them seems strangely stoic, at least in their dialogue.
This comment is officially insanely long, so I’ll stop writing. If I sounded like a prick, it’s the Sudafed. And in case it isn’t obvious, I enjoyed the interview and spending the day reading both of your work.