three a.m.

I read an essay today on Salmagundi, The Price of Irony, which is more or less a polemic against the tyrannous reign of irony in our day and age (particularly in theater and literature) and now I’m angry with myself because I thought about writing this essay last year, though mine probably wouldn’t have been as good.  I’m sure there are a dozen more floating around out there anyways.  Here’s a few sentences from the second paragraph:

"Irony is the postmodern form of conspicuous self-consciousness and suits
our era’s puerility – its fey aestheticism and political
cynicism — to a tee. It is complacency’s rationalization,
              disengagement’s excuse, the alienated spectator’s self-justification.
The ironic bystander (the phrase is redundant) is the citizen’s
jeering nemesis and the poet’s wily shadow trying to make
      sure that truth and beauty and goodness, those stalwarts of the world before it was disenchanted, do not re-infect the post-modern’s cool voice with hot earnestness. Or make us think too hard or feel
too keenly."

It goes on to discuss (and trash) McDonaugh’s play Pillowman as an example of of what he’s talking about (a comedy invovling child molestation and torture — actually, I’ve been wanting to read it). 

I like that kind of stuff as much as the next guy, probably more, but really I’m sick to death of it.  I’m starving for some more voices that least flirt with sincerity, stories with something at their core.  (Irony probably too big a term to throw around like the author of the above essay does, but I’m talking about the flippant, aloof, and often vicious sort of stuff that creates distance between the reader and the world — basically, the chickenshit posturing of people that are clever but don’t really have anything to say)

Of course, irony is sometimes hard to resist, as pockets of mainstream culture are completely without a sense of it.  We don’t even have to get into politics and news media — just witness the rise of reality television or check the lyrics to the top forty songs.  I recently had the misfortune of catching a video of a song called Rock-N-Roll Queen (by Subways):

You are the sun,

You are the only one,

My heart is blue,

My heart is blue for you

You are the sun,

You are the only one,

You are so cool,

You are so rock & roll

To be fair, there’s a lot better stuff out there, even on MTV, but there’s a lot more just like that, daily proof that God has abandoned us (otherwise he’d be casting some f’ing lightning on those dudes, turning their guitars into cobras, working some miracles to cleanse the world).  I saw this video on MTV while shooting pool, but then the VJ came on, and he was wearing a sweatshirt with a couple of eighteen-wheelers and American flags raising in the background, like something you’d find in a truckstop in Kansas.  So as MTV tries to cash in on irony, they do it in such a unsubtle way that its hard to see it as anything but mean-spirited (does this whole ironic trucker pose amount to anything more than a bunch of spoiled upper-middle class kids making fun of the working class?).  Anyways, I do hold out hope that, if nothing else, more writers will tire of the type of irony I’ve been complaining about: intellectually vapid, emotionally cold, morally bankrupt.

Just finished watching Gus Van Sant’s Last Days — which kind of sucks, by the way — and have been thinking about Kurt Cobain.  I always thought it was pretty lame that he shot himself in the head.  I guess it would have been worse if he’d OD’d (cliche), and he’s certainly better off dead than playing the super bowl half-time show, but still — I never really got that tortured artist thing, where guys who have enough money and fame to do anything in the world (they don’t have to keep making shitty music or anything else) whine about their pain.  Somebody set me straight if I’m out of line here, but don’t you think people like that –who are in a position to make a difference — have some sort of responsibility to the world — not like live up to their potential responsbility, but like give something back responsibility; feed the hungry, clothe the children, fight for justice and peace.  Something.  Maybe that’s the pressure that gets to them, but more likely it’s the booze and the drugs. 

Anyways, I like the part where he wanders around his castle wearing a dress and carrying a shotgun (spoilers ahead). Maybe if I had a big estate like that, I’d go a little nuts.  The movie is pretty boring, though what really bothered me was that it was unnecessarily fragmented, full of long shots of bushes and windows with stuff happening behind them that you can barely see, along with that annoying trick where you see a scene two or three times from different perspectives, so you never know how much time is supposed to have passed.  Then after he finally does the deed, the rockstar’s naked ghost rises from his corpse and climbs and invisible ladder and fades out at the top of the screen (stairway to heaven, anyone?).  Like something from "How to Make Art Movies for Dummies."  Probably I’m a bit critical because I was a Nirvana fan and I’ve liked most of Van Sant’s stuff — even Elephant. 

Finally saw Brokeback Mountain the other night and was pleased to find it as good as everyone seems to think it is.  Yeah, I’ll throw in my vote for Heath Ledger for the Oscar, and maybe even a Best Picture, though I’ll admit I squirmed a bit during the man-love scene.  And let’s face it — that scene was kind of forced anyways.  Perhaps there’s no such thing as a graceful cowboy hookup.

Speaking of starving artists — this whole graduation thing looms larger every day.  How’s the world out there?

Sorry, haven’t been out in the world lately, just holing up in my apartment, which is good on days like today, when it’s colder than a welldigger’s ass outside.  I read WIlliam Gay’s Provinces of Night.  He’s probably the best stylist I’ve read since Martin Amis.  Here’s the first two paragraphs:

Just at twilight Boyd came up the gravelled walk, the chain with its plowpoint weight drawing the gate closed behind him, before him the shanty black and depthless as a stageprop against the failing light.  On the porch the old man in the rocking chair sat staring burnt-eyed at him like some revenant out of his past.
Which he was, but Boyd went on anyway.  Behind the shack the horizon went left and right as straight as a chalked line and as far as the eye could see, the furrowed earth tending away toward a hammered sky that looked like turbulent waters at land’s end.  The old man just watched him come, sepia felthatted old man like a curling Walker Evans photograph, brittle and fragile as memory.

Still, the best part of the book is the author photo.

Aside from that, most of my excitement lately has come from grinding my own coffee beans.  woohoo.  Am possibly going to Nuevo Laredo next month when I go to Austin for AWP — if so, I’ll come back with a story for you guys.

Oh yeah–
Who’s not too old for Bonnaroo?