Hello all! As you might have noticed, lately I’ve been busy getting my birthday celebrations together. This affects the Review as it takes up a lot of my writing and reading time. I will be delivering my Birthday Lecture at my birthday party, tomorrow! I believe some of you will be there in person. If you’d like to attend over Discord, to see the lecture (and maybe even just talk to people who show up to the laptop?), you can join our Discord server if you’re a Citizen! Substack, alas, does not make it easy to integrate Discord. If you’re a Citizen (or an in-person friend) who wants to join our Discord server, please email me at peterjohnberard@gmail.com or, if you know me like that, message me on facebook for a link. If you’re not a Citizen, consider upgrading! The Discord server is a lot of fun.
I’m not leaving newsletter readers bereft, though, dear reader. Arguably, I’m leaving you with more reviews than any other week, as I present… thoughts on books that I read for my Birthday Lecture!
Gen X, Transgressive Writing, Connected Material - Stuff I Read for the 2023 Birthday Lecture
Tomorrow is my birthday party! I do it up big. I make a lot of food. I lay in a supply of drink. I invite a lot of people, from the various areas of my life where I’ve been lucky enough to find friends. And I give a lecture! I do some reading on a topic and deliver a lecture on it. I think of the overarching field as “the vernacular history of ideas.” This year, I did something I usually don’t do- a sequel. Last year, I tried to write about the intellectual history of Generation X. This was biting off more than I could chew. It was my longest lecture but more than half of it was methodological- how to write intellectual history about this sub-intellectual artifact, the concept of generation? I don’t think it was bad, exactly. But I felt there was more to grapple with. Out of a sense of honor, I returned to Gen X intellectual history this year, specifically, the concept of transgression and/or edginess in art, primarily the one art I know anything about, writing.
I read a lot for these birthday lectures, but looking at the list reminds me of how much more I could have read. I guess that’s what happens when I take on what could be a topic for a book in a lecture that’s supposed to top out at an hour! So I’m happy to hear recommendations, reader, but please don’t give me a ration of shit for not getting to your favorite nineties book. We might as well move from primary to secondary.
Gen X and/or Transgressive fiction writers-
I had already read Bret Easton Ellis, in the form of American Psycho and Less Than Zero, but I read his in-between book, The Rules of Attraction, too. In a better world, I would like Ellis’ fiction more, or less. I could take joy from loving his books. It would be fun to really hate them, as Ellis has become a caricature of himself. As it stands, I see some talent and some verve, so I can’t dismiss them entirely, but I don’t enjoy them and find the things he is trying to do fundamentally uninteresting.
Doug Coupland’s Generation X is a baffling and boring plotless recitation of conversation between jaded members of the titular generation. I’d be insulted if my generation were named after this.
I did not think Infinite Jest was great, though it, and the work of David Foster Wallace more generally, might be spoiled by substantial differences in ethos… that’s a running theme in this reading.
He’s far from a Gen Xer, born in 1914, but he’s such a big influence I had a look at William S. Burroughs, specifically Naked Lunch. That one was interesting on a number of levels- his shock material doesn’t shock much anymore, but it’s well-written and the look at historical drug culture had some interest for me.
Kathy Acker is probably the real “transgressive” writer who has the most legs, these days, in terms of reputation. I’d be lying if I said I really loved her novels, like Empire of the Senseless and My Mother Demonology. I get it takes talent to seem that amateurish. But… that’s how it seemed. I like plot, characters, incident, humor, pathos, and Acker rejected all of these. The shocking stuff is either not shocking anymore (“oh wow people with tattoos?!”) or is less shocking and more unpleasant (incest, etc). I’m glad people like her work, but it’s clearly “not for me” in more than one sense of the phrase.
The two transgressive writers I liked the most were Dennis Cooper and Darius James. Dennis Cooper’s Closer, the first in a series about queer youth starting in the seventies, plumbs the depths of both fucked up shit (sometimes literally) and of emotional blankness in the face of horror much better than Ellis, who got famous for it. James’ Negrophobia is a riotous phantasmagoria of race, sex, and both urban decay and gentrification in New York just before the limpieza of the city really took hold, by an author who borrows heavily from “grindhouse” and other inspirationally sleazy cinema- he’s also written about the history of blaxploitation. I felt good about liking these- it showed that I could enjoy some of these edgy writers even when their ethoi and concerns were very far from mine, as long as they did something interesting.
Gen X Edgy Nonfictionists
Jim Goad wound up becoming a bigger part of my lecture than I ever intended. It’s not because he’s any good – he isn’t, as a writer or, if it matters, as a person – but because he’s a notable bridge figure between a few different literary worlds: the ‘zine culture, transgressive literature, “hate literature,” something like the “alternative”-addled nineties mainstream where he won acclaim, and eventually the altright. Let’s put it this way- there’s try-hard edginess that tries (hard!) to be cool and impressive, then there’s try-hard edginess that dispenses with that and goes for extremity, the edgelord figuring if he can just escalate more than the other guy he wins, somehow. That’s what you see in Answer Me!, the ‘zine Goad edited with his ex-wife, and in Redneck Manifesto. The answer to Goad is to beat his ass for some of his bullshit – wife-beating, racism, antisemitism etc – then give him a prescription for ritalin, because honestly, the vibe is less “scary dude on the edge” and more “elementary school kid who can’t stop himself.”
Gavin McInnes, on the other hand, is the try-hard edgelord going for cool. And what an idea of cool we get in his 2010 memoirs, How To Piss In Public! Yeah, you can find hints of the fascist he either was or would become. But for the most part, the memoirs was a long list of self-aggrandizing and deeply dull anecdotes, that only acquire interest historically. This is how you’d impress people, back then- tell meandering stories about high school (including detailed descriptions of the naked bodies of underage girls), the punk scene, publishing. You wouldn’t know these stories were meant to be about how great McInnes is, because most of them are boring and show the teller to be an asshole, but don’t worry, McInnes makes the point clear, because he ends the stories with a conclusion about how he’s great. There’s a compulsive element here, too, like with Goad… you get the feeling he can’t quite help himself, never developed the adult capacity to shut up, to reflect, to decide what face to show the world. This seems common in a certain kind of Gen Xer- ironic, in that anecdotally, there’s overlap between that type and the type who likes to talk about how it’s the younger generations that are emotionally weak.
Some readers might object to my putting this on the list here, but I’m doing it anyway- The eXile book, by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi. Some would object due to the amount of misogynistic humor, including rape jokes, in this book - others, because they like Ames (a little less likely they like Taibbi these days) and don’t want him included on a list of Gen X edgelords. Well, tough, on both sides. The early Exile deserves to be considered part of the Gen X edgy/transgressive space. I’m aware that they disliked – hated – others in that space. That’s ok- it’s a cultural space, not a country club or a political party. I also happen to think that they were better writers than the likes of Goad and McInnes (who Ames would tangle with some) and also did actual serious reporting, from Moscow and elsewhere, which is a marked distinction from the others. The eXile book (I’ll use the silly X convention when referring to the book but not in general) has some worthwhile biographical material and even the less interesting stuff is elevated by Ames’ and, yes, Taibbi’s writing chops, but between some really teeth-sucking bits of humor and it being somewhat dated, twenty-five or so years on, at the end of the day it’s more useful as a time capsule than anything else. One interesting thing about Ames in particular- I might be biased, but I think he’s written the most interesting defenses of edginess and his version of alternative culture (as I recall, the Exile stance was that Nirvana was good but not quite “their thing”), as an unironic good, or anyway, a good in a world he understands as fundamentally bad. That’s worth something, in a space otherwise defined by empty posturing.
Two collections edited by Amy Scholder and Ira Silverberg, High Risk volumes 1 and 2, were of major use to my work this year. Scholder and Silverberg were both pretty big deals in the publishing world, back when you could still make your way to big-deal-status by putting stuff out there in print that others wouldn’t. Arguably, they were some of the last participants in/beneficiaries of (in a career sense- every reader with sense is a beneficiary) the paperback revolution. It’s hard to tell where the sincerity of their belief that transgressive fiction, bringing out the voices of the marginal, could change the world for the better, and how much of that was cover to publish material people would pay to gawk at (or jerk off to) - because it didn’t matter, in an era where a landmark case ending formal censorship in literature came about thanks to a paperback publisher with an equal passion for European literature and for literary erotica. The content in the High Risk collections vary in quality, but they were useful to get an idea of the state of the transgressive literature space.
I also read a lot in various periodicals- Spin, 3 AM, The Baffler, Vice, etc. Spin was probably the most useful, ironically- I had so much edgy material coming at me it was good to check it against a publication that acted as a sort of valve between the “edge” and the mainstream.
Theorists, Then and Now
I read a few theorists, both because I thought they’d offer insights into the subject and because the period I write about was a high point for public discussion of theory- postmodernism, “French Theory,” deconstruction, all found their ways into the nineties culture wars. It wasn’t just a matter of stuffy conservative fulminating or screeching moral panic (both were present in spades, of course)- the transgressive writers mingled with theory-geeks both in their writing and socially.
Dick Hebdige wrote Subculture way back in the seventies, which kicked off the whole “being in a subculture was an act of resistance to an overpowering but nebulous power structure” thing. It’s not a terrible book in and of itself, but you can see it sowing the seeds for some bad reads in the future, especially in that he could allow for no subcultural dynamic other than its relationship to an oppressive cultural mainstream. This makes a lot more sense in England, where Hebdige is from and where his case studies were based, and where there’s a much more thoroughgoing sense of class and culture boundaries… but still, there was more to it even there, I feel confident.
Kathy Acker got a lot of attention from various high-end theorists in critics, in her life and after her 1995 death. I read not one but two products of this. One was by Chris Kraus, who’s best know for I Love Dick, a book about her and her husband’s romantic obsession with the aforementioned Dick Hebdige, that became a minor classic of sorts (even made into an unsuccessful tv show with the great Kathryn Hahn). I didn’t get much out of it, I found it boring, and also didn’t get that much out of After Kathy Acker, her attempt to forge a biography out of the welter of myth surrounding the writer. Kraus ran in the same circles, and for all of its postmodern conceits that bunch writes about itself with as much self-obsession as the old New York Intellectuals, just also with much greater intellectual insecurity. McKenzie Wark also knew Acker, was a lover of hers in fact, before her transition. Her Philosophy for Spiders is more interesting – if nothing else, the memoirs portion are less scene score-keeping and more personal – though it does, intentionally it seems, try to make a virtue of a lack of clarity. Not the big-word obfuscation of your Derridas, but the small-word, refusing to explain what you mean kind.
I read Frederic Jameson and Francois Lyotard on postmodernism, but strayed away from that subject for the lecture. Sorry all. Jameson was better, to me, than Lyotard, but it was a while back and I’d have to look back at both to really tell why beyond “French peevishness.”
Critics
Lastly, I read critics, both contemporary with the transgressive writers and contemporary with us. One pretty poignant example was Fred Pfeil, who wrote Another Tale to Tell, published in 1990. It tries to thread the needle between appreciating what was then thought of “theory” and “identity politics” and what those brought to the table, and critiquing the unfortunate and sometimes suborned ways in which these were expressed. It’s depressing how little we’ve moved on since then. He was, from this sample, a thoughtful, perceptive reader and a good prose writer, and was a beloved teacher at Trinity in Hartford. Pfeil died pretty young, in 2005.
There’s a fair few premature middle aged deaths in the critical vein I worked! Elizabeth Young was an English critic who died at age fifty, in 2001. She made her name defending literature that was, as one might say, “too hot for the British literary establishment.” I don’t think she went too far in defending the right of people to enjoy and get something out of depictions of misdeeds, or in terms of skewering the notion that being able to write (or even read) about bad things makes you bad… but I do think her reads of “underground” literature, especially of Bret Ellis, were way too generous, likely in reaction to moralistic condemnation by stuffy British critics who had probably bayoneted Kenyan babies in their younger days but thought that American Psycho would warp the youth.
Robin Mookerjee taught literature at one of my ill-starred alma maters, The New School, and wrote a book, Transgressive Fiction, that sought to put the transgressive writers I write about into the context of the history of satire. This is the sort of chewy, assertive book I enjoy, even when I don’t agree with the points. Here, I do think Mookerjee is onto something, that there’s a relationship between 70s-90s transgressive writing and classical satire (complete with a kind of moralism on the backhand, which has been present in the genre from Juvenal’s day on). He overstretched his point in a lot of areas and also got his descriptions of a few of the books just wrong, in a literal, whiffs on what happened in the plot, what the characters did, etc. Still, an interesting book, now hard to find, and he died in 2016 at age 54. That sucks- I’d’ve liked to see more from him.
Arguably, James Annesley was one of the moralizing British critics Liz Young took issue with, in his case from the left (Young disdained both left and right criticism for its moralism, and she wasn’t entirely wrong to do so). His Blank Fictions treats the likes of Ellis, Cooper etc. as so many smugglers of consumerism and meaninglessness into the British literary bloodstream. For his own part, Jess Row does something similar by talking about the whiteness of literary culture in very 2010s style in White Flights, which if I remember right concludes that the performance of white guilt is what literature needs to face its (very real) problem of treating race as invisible unless race is “the subject” of a given work of fiction? “Strange flex” as they say. Lastly, I reread Steve Hyden’s What Happened to Alternative Nation? I read it as it was coming into being circa 2010-11 in the pages of the Onion’s AV Club. I got into a comment fight with the author! I was pretty mean. Looking back, he didn’t entirely deserve the meanness, but honestly, the book’s not great, a mezza-mezza combination of personal memoirs from someone whose teens and early twenties passed during the nineties, and pretty anodyne music criticism.
I read some French guys! Not just Lyotard. I read Emmanuel Carrere’s Limonov, a biography of the Russian writer/provocateur/politician. I read it both out of general interest and the idea that I might try to do a more global look at edginess, or else write more about the Exile. I didn’t pursue the latter two ideas much- a good thing, Carrere says nothing about the Exile, even as Limonov wrote for them (one of the counts on the indictment of the Exile as fascist, letting the leader of a National Bolshevik party write for them- I don’t think it’s that simple). It’s well written and interesting but you can see the gaps, and not just as an old Exile reader. Francois Cusset wrote French Theory, a look at the adoption, adaptation, and cultural arguments over… well, over a body of theory they called French, but which Cusset can only see as a strange assemblage of found parts, some Foucault here, some Derrida there, Lyotard over there, etc., even though these people were pursuing very different projects from each other and didn’t usually get along. It’s a good read, especially for Cusset’s sympathetic but wry analysis of academic careerism.
Woof! Even Mithra is tuckered out after all that
Wow, with this combination of massive scope and laser-sharp insights I'd say the two birthday lectures
could be converted to a book (if you ever had the time and inclination)