Entry tags:

bolaño, prose style

comfort and refuge in a sort of recession [or, embroidery and weskits (or, more cake vs. icing)]
When I turn to literature for pure pleasure, the embroidery just has to be there.  Unquestionably, so must the weskit.  But the weave, the thread, must be fine. (A mandarin, limited way of seeing and explaining it, but a realization that's been re-sounding.) When things are bleak, as they seem now, when the whole of the external day is news reports and the kind of communication that can be replaced with algebraic symbols, I predictably seek refuge not in a stylistic reflection of reality, but (yes, rather hysterically) in a sentence or brushstroke that radiates its intentionality, its art.   (My regressive reflex is to cling to purple when the plains reiterate themselves.)  I want unique artifacts, shining strands, throbbing sentences, intricate sculpture, nothing even deceptively disposable.  I've seen too much, lately, of lives spent on dead airtime, watching people just let time die, those whose days and weeks and months and years could be abbreviated by a few x's and n's.  Right now, I need more than the plain what of the weskit, I need the vivid (hoobla-hoobla-hoobla) how of the seams and the pockets and the buttons.

A lot of this is a good sense articulation of the general hum in my head about plain prose and documentary realism.

And also:


In a theoretical sense, all of this is fascinating.   But right now, the plain prose, the bleak affect is (really strikingly) a cold comfort.  I can't see it as a tonic.   I can't, at the moment, see it as an opportunity to mine the deceptively flat surface for meaning.  Surrounding bleakness (grey sky, beige company) turns me into a myopic curmudgeon in dandy's clothing.  While acknowledging this, I feel compelled to if not quite rationalize such a response, to understand it.  (That is, I feel apologetic about the limitations of my aesthetic within a particular landscape and time.)   Which seems like a good opportunity to preserve in ether some reactions I had last year to Jonathan Franzen's reactions about experimental narrative:

I’ve been moving through Jonathan Franzen’s first essay collection, and it’s amazing how curmudgeonly he is, and how clearly his depression and elevated sense of despair seeps through in his writing.  He can’t, for example, reconcile contemporary technology (the Web, television) with the survival and appreciation of good writing and reading.  He’s blindly and almost proudly afraid of change, fetishizing things like rotary phones and Corolla typewriters, as if their loss were synonymous with a loss of appreciation for good writing and good art.  Still, every now then, between bouts of conventionally irrational liberal guilt and supposedly elitist despair, he says or quotes from a few things that ring very true for me.  Such as: