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This comes too late to be of any use to Thomas Disch, but for the sake of the others whom I don’t know, I want to offer a concise manifesto.
I have told practitioners of craft media for two decades now that if they want the greats of clay or fiber to be in the global biennials, they need to show why they stack up favorably against the best practitioners of traditional fine-art media, and now why they can hold their own against the new media beloved of the global gatekeepers.
I have just delivered in this journal a cri de coeur (two, actually) concerning myth-oriented genre fiction and why its particular predilections have dragged down an entire field of endeavor, one which deserves to be in play alongside the world’s other intellectual options. Serious explorations are tarred with the brush of the adolescently exuberant role-playing cons. (If a popular insult regarding hip artists is that they put the con in contemporary, maybe we need to figure out how to put the contemporary in genre-cons.)
A unique level of wit and innovation alongside the seriousness gets completely lost in consequence.
In like fashion, it appears scandalous that some of us who feel compelled to know the existence of what pretends to be Everything not only had never read Thomas Disch, but had no idea of the general thrust of what he had written. Perusal of his LJ revealed only poems that made Weldon Kees look like a cockeyed optimist, and those of us who tend to chronic depression do not need more updatings of Weldon Kees.
Dana Gioia, who spearheaded the Kees mini-revival, knew all about Disch when asked by the NYT, so the formalist-minded chair of the National Endowment for the Arts must have broader tastes and an even darker streak than we knew.
Yet Disch seems to have had more in him than pessimism (as I expect to learn from his eulogists very shortly) and it is scandalous that there was nobody making the case to general readers (back in the day) why his books should have been thrown on the read-someday pile along with, say, Thomas Bernhard, and probably picked up sooner than Bernhard’s impenetrably lugubrious experimentations.
Some of the essays I have cherished most over a lifetime have been ones that brought to the attention to mainstream readers the best of the genre preoccupations, with explanations of why, let’s say, Thomas Disch was as worth reading as Theodore Roethke (a major stretch all round, except for the Midwest-depressive origins, but I want to keep going with this).
Michael Chabon’s new volume of collected essays has led to a reviewer writing the hallowed name of M. R. James in mainstream media for the first time in God knows how long. Chabon was presumably originally commissioned to write the preface to the M. R. James tales, but he declared that the largely forgotten James, more likely to be confused with P. D. than with Henry, had written one of the greatest short stories in English, and the reviewer took note.
In the age of viral media, there ought to be more chances than ever to insert the best of the best of genre fiction into general discourse. If somebody’s sci-fi novel outdoes Salman Rushdie in terms of addressing the 21st century’s essential cross-cultural issues, why not say so and hope the observation eventually makes its way to the top spot in Arts & Letters Daily or one of the anthology websites that more folks read (I shudder to think how small the tribe of aldaily-heads may be).
Disch didn’t help with things like his slighting comments about Nobel laureates, but his proposal for a collection of Nobel Prize acceptance speeches by non-winners wouldn’t have been as wickedly funny if he hadn’t dissed the worthy folks who actually got the award. If somebody who knows why Wislawa Szymborska (or, pace Harold Bloom, Doris Lessing) actually deserved to get the prize had taken up the cause of Thomas Disch, it would have helped.
But as long as we are expected to have Szymborska or D. Lessing on our shelves, or Thomas Bernhard and Thomas Pynchon for that matter, and not Thomas Disch as a matter of course, the world will go on as it is, and the genres will continue to be judged by the worst or the least interesting examples and nobody but genre readers will know about the best and all but the absolutely greatest.
I need to repeat: If someone has written a genre novel or volume of poetry that deserves to be read as though it were already part of the general world of readers of the intellectual journals, to which I assume all readers of this LJ belong, then someone who belongs to that world needs to make the case on behalf of that writer. And only those who operate in more than one world concurrently can do it.
In the age of online essays, it is (very remotely) possible even for writers of no particular reputation to make the connection work. I remain amazed at how many insightful writings one discovers because they pop up in a quest for some of the less popular Google search terms.
And anything we can do to make the greatest examples of neglected books by living writers known to the people who would at least buy them and toss them onto the stack, the better off those writers will be, both financially and emotionally. It is nice to know that Chabon has plumped for M. R. James as Gioia plumped for Weldon Kees, but neither deceased writer is materially helped by the publicity.
What is more (since life is finite, and the unread stacks will still be around when all of us meet our ends), if the neglected writers’ general contributions to global culture have been made known to us, our lives will have been enriched whether we ever get round to reading beyond the context-setting that the books’ fans have given us.
And if a few of us, as I say, buy the books as a result of knowing why we ought to be reading them alongside the books we already know we need to read….
I have told practitioners of craft media for two decades now that if they want the greats of clay or fiber to be in the global biennials, they need to show why they stack up favorably against the best practitioners of traditional fine-art media, and now why they can hold their own against the new media beloved of the global gatekeepers.
I have just delivered in this journal a cri de coeur (two, actually) concerning myth-oriented genre fiction and why its particular predilections have dragged down an entire field of endeavor, one which deserves to be in play alongside the world’s other intellectual options. Serious explorations are tarred with the brush of the adolescently exuberant role-playing cons. (If a popular insult regarding hip artists is that they put the con in contemporary, maybe we need to figure out how to put the contemporary in genre-cons.)
A unique level of wit and innovation alongside the seriousness gets completely lost in consequence.
In like fashion, it appears scandalous that some of us who feel compelled to know the existence of what pretends to be Everything not only had never read Thomas Disch, but had no idea of the general thrust of what he had written. Perusal of his LJ revealed only poems that made Weldon Kees look like a cockeyed optimist, and those of us who tend to chronic depression do not need more updatings of Weldon Kees.
Dana Gioia, who spearheaded the Kees mini-revival, knew all about Disch when asked by the NYT, so the formalist-minded chair of the National Endowment for the Arts must have broader tastes and an even darker streak than we knew.
Yet Disch seems to have had more in him than pessimism (as I expect to learn from his eulogists very shortly) and it is scandalous that there was nobody making the case to general readers (back in the day) why his books should have been thrown on the read-someday pile along with, say, Thomas Bernhard, and probably picked up sooner than Bernhard’s impenetrably lugubrious experimentations.
Some of the essays I have cherished most over a lifetime have been ones that brought to the attention to mainstream readers the best of the genre preoccupations, with explanations of why, let’s say, Thomas Disch was as worth reading as Theodore Roethke (a major stretch all round, except for the Midwest-depressive origins, but I want to keep going with this).
Michael Chabon’s new volume of collected essays has led to a reviewer writing the hallowed name of M. R. James in mainstream media for the first time in God knows how long. Chabon was presumably originally commissioned to write the preface to the M. R. James tales, but he declared that the largely forgotten James, more likely to be confused with P. D. than with Henry, had written one of the greatest short stories in English, and the reviewer took note.
In the age of viral media, there ought to be more chances than ever to insert the best of the best of genre fiction into general discourse. If somebody’s sci-fi novel outdoes Salman Rushdie in terms of addressing the 21st century’s essential cross-cultural issues, why not say so and hope the observation eventually makes its way to the top spot in Arts & Letters Daily or one of the anthology websites that more folks read (I shudder to think how small the tribe of aldaily-heads may be).
Disch didn’t help with things like his slighting comments about Nobel laureates, but his proposal for a collection of Nobel Prize acceptance speeches by non-winners wouldn’t have been as wickedly funny if he hadn’t dissed the worthy folks who actually got the award. If somebody who knows why Wislawa Szymborska (or, pace Harold Bloom, Doris Lessing) actually deserved to get the prize had taken up the cause of Thomas Disch, it would have helped.
But as long as we are expected to have Szymborska or D. Lessing on our shelves, or Thomas Bernhard and Thomas Pynchon for that matter, and not Thomas Disch as a matter of course, the world will go on as it is, and the genres will continue to be judged by the worst or the least interesting examples and nobody but genre readers will know about the best and all but the absolutely greatest.
I need to repeat: If someone has written a genre novel or volume of poetry that deserves to be read as though it were already part of the general world of readers of the intellectual journals, to which I assume all readers of this LJ belong, then someone who belongs to that world needs to make the case on behalf of that writer. And only those who operate in more than one world concurrently can do it.
In the age of online essays, it is (very remotely) possible even for writers of no particular reputation to make the connection work. I remain amazed at how many insightful writings one discovers because they pop up in a quest for some of the less popular Google search terms.
And anything we can do to make the greatest examples of neglected books by living writers known to the people who would at least buy them and toss them onto the stack, the better off those writers will be, both financially and emotionally. It is nice to know that Chabon has plumped for M. R. James as Gioia plumped for Weldon Kees, but neither deceased writer is materially helped by the publicity.
What is more (since life is finite, and the unread stacks will still be around when all of us meet our ends), if the neglected writers’ general contributions to global culture have been made known to us, our lives will have been enriched whether we ever get round to reading beyond the context-setting that the books’ fans have given us.
And if a few of us, as I say, buy the books as a result of knowing why we ought to be reading them alongside the books we already know we need to read….
