Glaring at me from my clutter ridden desk is this damn copy of a book I forgot to return to Barnes and Noble. It sits on the corner, gathering dust and my loathing. Why do I have to write something about you, you piece of crap? My life would be perfect if it weren’t for your passive aggressive presence, reminding me of my own procrastinations...
It took a while to get over my initial disdain for Saunder’s Pastoralia. I have a programmed revulsion to most postmodern-y works; something about them generally leave me feeling empty and dissatisfied. Upon completing this collection of short stories, I had to ask myself if the dread I felt was a result of the book, the postmodern movement, or, god forbid, my own meager existence.
There is something unsettlingly familiar about the characters that populate these stories. They are pathetic and two dimensional. They are insecure, dependent, petty and unattractive—everything I consciously aspire not to be. Reading this book is like passing through a crackerjack town that I thankfully never lived in. If I had, I would have been so glad to leave it behind.
These stories is just that: a collection of tales from forgotten towns about goofy rednecks that are easy targets of our ridicule. The bizarre settings, absurd situations and stylized rhetoric hyperbolize the struggles of these characters. They become caricatures that remind us of our own dissatisfactions and possible failures.
A pastoral is a picture representing the shepherd’s life. It evokes a sentimentality for rural expanses and simpler times. The title of this book is suspect. Though the settings and inhabitants appear simple, they are involved in complicated and often perverse relationships. Saunders is a gifted humorist. His timing is impeccable, and his impressions make us laugh and guffaw. Then we burn rubber, spray gravel, and get the hell out of dodge.
I guess this dread I feel is that we left them all behind. Ultimately, Saunders does not deliver his characters from their own tragedies, as though holding up that dirty mirror was all he cared to do. His limited action implies that they are the only saboteurs of their own potential, and to give hope is merely to enable their dependencies.
Meanwhile, in NYC, where sexy people live sexy lives...
The meeting was lovely and animated as always. The flock of us, including newcomer Jules, descended on "Mother's" for a round of brews, fries and intellectual snobbery, really, discussing a book in a Brooklyn bar on a Saturday night? Yes, the atmosphere was a little loud for our discussion, yes the other patrons looked at us over their shoulders, what curious people, this band of beautiful intelligentsia... And what pleasant prelude to the debauchery that ensued. Round two rolled around in the form of my 30th birfday party and I had a blast, I hope y'all did too!
~Shomsie
p.s. the pix that follow are courtesy of Mr. Watt, I do not own a mac, so most of the pix didn't convert =(
and, one final p.s.
this is an excerpt from an essay by the late David Foster Wallace that I was trying to work into this bookgang post before I realized I was practically writing a term paper. It relates to my feeling of helplessenss and dread...the essay is called "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" and appears in the collection "A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again."
"...So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tried to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As [Lewis] Hyde. . .puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage." This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly funny to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing by trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow. . .oppressed."
