Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Saturday, February 14, 2004 My eyes are all squinty from sitting in this office all day doing nothing but staring at the Internet (Yeah, I know: boo hoo hoo, right?) and I know my wrists are going to hurt like hell later because surfing the Net, with its reliance on mouse usage, fucks with my hands far worse than regular ol' work does. I'm (re)reading Gravity's Rainbow and it's just a fucking knock-out. I first read this book when I first got out of college fifteen years ago and my reading:understanding ratio was seriously unhinged. Seriously, pages going by and me comprehending jack shit but being so in love with the style, I didn't care. My reading comprehension has improved somewhat (it helps that for a long time, I had not one but two copies of Steven Weisenburger's A Gravity's Rainbow Companion that was first published in 1988 but reviewed after I finished the book in early '89--and there was also a conversation with a scary-smart coworker who finished GR a few months back and wanted to talk about it) but I'm still staggered--positively floored--by the prose in it: "Behind you, long, night-long queues of men in uniform move away slowly, kicking AWOL bags along, mostly silent, toward exit doors painted beige, but with edges smudged browner in bell-curves of farewell by the generation of hands." God, that image of the bell-curves! And the repetition of the word "long"--obvious at first and then buried--or the rhyme of "bell" and "farewell." (A-and bell-curves being an integral metaphor to GR to boot--to say nothing of his background in math, science and technical writing that allows him such comfort with such metaphors). It reminds me of what Delillo had to say about Pynchon: "Somebody quoted Norman Mailer as saying that he wasn't a better writer because his contemporaries weren't better. I don't know whether he really said that or not, but the point I want to make is that no one in Pynchon's generation can make that statement. If we're not as good as we should be it's not because there isn't a standard. And I think Pynchon, more than any other writer, has set the standard. He's raised the stakes." Re-reading Gravity's Rainbow makes me wonder what the HELL I've been doing these last fifteen years. I should have just been re-reading this book every year, and learning how to write. In other writing news, I'm sure everyone and their dog has read this article on Mary Sues (hell, I've read it twice in the last three months by following different links) but I find it endlessly fascinating. The Mary Sue, for those of you who don't know, is, well let me just quote Pat Pflieger's opening paragraph: "She's amazingly intelligent, outrageously beautiful, adored by all around her -- and absolutely detested by most reading her adventures. She's Mary Sue, the most reviled character type in media fan fiction. Basically, she's a character representing the author of the story, an avatar, the writer's projection into an interesting world full of interesting people whom she watches weekly and thinks about daily. Sometimes the projections get processed into interesting characters, themselves. Usually, though, they don't." As Pfleiger goes on to analyze and pull apart the culture of the Mary Sue in fanfic, I find myself horrified and mesmerized. The Mary Sue is naked wish fulfillment and ego gratification...and yet, what are most characters in a writer's repertoire but variants of such needs? What really is so embarrassing about a Mary Sue, other than that need being so unsubtly disrobed? The protagonists of nearly all popular fiction, when you get down to it, are just Mary Sues. Pflieger acknowledges this (a little too briefly for my tastes), but the questions, half-formed, remain for me: are there Mary Sues, and "real" characters created by "experienced" writers? Or are most characters merely better rounded, more complex Mary Sues? (And the questions I know that is underneath that: am I an experienced writer? Or just a writer of my own personal fanfic?) posted by Jeff Lester | 4:23 PM | |
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