Gaslighting Elmo; Defending Criticism (Phil Christman); Sizing Up Trump with Charles Baxter, Thomas Pynchon, and Billy Joel
Small Bits with Links to More
Gaslighting Elmo
Tybalt and Mercutio. Mr Jones and Axel Heyst. Steve Austin and Vince MacMahon. Conflict between forces that stand for something larger than themselves catches our attention and makes us want to finish the play, the novel, the film, or the broadcast.
If you want to dive into the nuts and bolts of how to structure fiction, you don’t need an MFA. You’d do just as well buying a few books on the subject. I’m reading 20 Master Plots by Ronald Tobias right now and I think it’s very good. But this post isn’t about how to layer tension into fictive relationships and how to transform story into plot.
This post is about slow-burning narrative conflict, though. This post is about keen (near-obsessive) analysis. This post is about MatPat’s deft look at Elmo’s 20-year feud with a friggin rock.
You know Elmo, of course. You might not know MatPat or Rocko, but fair warning. This whole business is, as Richard Hugo might say, a triggering town. If you grew up in the tension of knowing, with Big Bird, that Mr. Snuffleupagus was real, this deep dive into the Street’s narrative over-correction might resonate. Stop Matthew any time you think he’s telling lies:
Phil Christman’s Random Defense of Criticism
Phil Christman’s Substack (The Tourist) was recommended to me by the algorithms because I follow Phil on Twitter. It’s a reader supported newsletter, but some posts are free. This is one of them, and I think he makes some very good points.
A Random Defense of Literary (Etc.) Criticism:
Speaking of Which
Did you seen the news that Donald Trump flew into DC unannounced last night? Speculation is rampant (at least on Twitter). Is he going to Walter Reed? Is he going to be indicted? Is he just going golfing? I suppose we’ll find out soon. In the meantime, here are links to two older pieces that never went very far (though that later was, graciously, published at The Daily Drunk). They have to do with art, music, criticism, and the muting of reality in the Trump era:
On Made Mistakes and Making Them
Twenty years ago, Charles Baxter named the unsettling traits of America’s then-adolescent “culture of deniability” and what its “dysfunctional narratives” meant for politics and fiction.
I recently read “Dysfunctional Narratives: or: ‘Mistakes Were Made,’” the first essay in Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House. This collection on the craft of writing was published in 1997, which means the discussion about who, precisely, is to blame for the prevalence of what Baxter calls a culture of deniability in politics, life, and fiction (he thinks it’s finally Nixon), was written before Bill Clinton parsed the manifold definitions of the word is. Certainly, his warnings about the passive language behind statements like “mistakes were made” have not been heeded in what passes, now, for the exchange of moral and political ideas emanating from centers of institutionalized power. That said, there’s an absolute brilliance to Baxter’s synthesis of the mores native to what wasn’t, after all, the end of history.
Regarding fiction (the craft of writing stories, not the mastery of White House pressers), what displeases Baxter most is the dearth of characters owning up to their mistakes. In contemporary story-telling, he says, no one is responsible for their poor decisions…
Read the rest on my blog or on Medium.
On Billy Joel and Thomas Pynchon: It Was Always Christie Lee
My dad is in the basement, our first house, a bi-level he built in the 70s. I’m four, he still has the Pinto, in the summer everything about it burns, the buckles and the pleather and the smell of gasoline. We live a few blocks from the playground and the pool, there are still no big trees on our street, June scorches the sidewalks, the heat dizzies me in waves. Violets struggle up through cracks in the alley, I bring them water, as much as I can carry, eight ounces at a time in the Burger King Jedi glass.
He calls me inside. We stay cool watching Scooby, he pulls the old mattress out between the sofa and TV so I can jump and box. When the cartoons are over, we listen to An Innocent Man. The Nylon Curtain has come and gone, it’s reminded the world about our town. Some people are still pissed about “Allentown,” not really at Billy Joel, but about how he was right and how nothing changes. This is ‘83, ‘84. “Christie Lee”’s my favorite track.
In 2019 I’m 39. It’s been three major financial crises since Dad willed a living together for us. The market is up, that’s supposed to mean something, the pandemic is still months away. I start reading The Crying of Lot 49, I’m not hung up on numbers but it’s been sitting there for years and I’m through Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway (again), and I know for a fact Lawrence is going to kill poor Ricardo so I never do finish St. Mawr. SiriusXM has just brought back the Billy Joel Channel and Billy Joel is at the piano telling stories about how he writes his songs. He gets to “Christie Lee” and says “There’s a lot of clever stuff in there. Yeah, I’m pretty proud of that one.”
Read the rest at The Daily Drunk.
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