GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #867: MORE GORE

Vidal, that is.

 

The other day I found myself with an extra hour before I needed to meet up with a friend for lunch, so I went down to the Frugal Muse in Darien, my second favorite bookstore in the area. (Anderson's beats them out.) I suddenly found myself confronted with this book that you see above.

Rewind back to the late 'Nineties. I was a student at Elmhurst College (now University), and I had a job as a page at the Elmhurst Public Library. We'll get to the student part in a minute.

One day I was working in my section, which was the 800s. I'd already finished shelving my books, and there were no books at any of the nearby tables or the drop off cart. When that happened it was my duty to make sure the books are in Dewey order. We all had sheets where we would write down our progress. It was super boring work, so whenever I got the chance I would sit down and pretend to read the numbers on the lower three shelves. When I was fairly certain I was alone I would pick a book and read. That day I saw the book you see above (hardcover edition instead). I remembered, hey, didn't I read a story by him for class? I didn't recall the title (still don't), and I don't remember what happened. I do recall that it was a bit scandalous (*gasp!*) for its time. It was kind of interesting. I'll read some of the essays,

They had some really boring titles, so I only read one or two. I recall being pretty interested in the essays I did select, but I didn't really ever think about the book again, not until decades later when I was on a psych ward and found his book, Empire, and it helped me get through that rough patch of my life. It also converted me into a Vidal fan.

So of course I had to buy this book from the Muse. Only later, after I'd bragged on social media about it, did I think that maybe I should read an essay a day. So I started that yesterday.

I read the second this afternoon at one of the forest preserves. It brought me back to my time in college. The piece is called "Novelists and Critics of the 1940s." It is exactly what it sounds like and more. The thing that made me laugh is that it's a critique of critics. It's done with his usual dry wit, which was not something I was much into when I was a student working across the street at the library. But it brought me back today because it resurrected all the names of critics that I've tried to forget from my time as an English major. (I was also a Philosophy major, which explains a lot, unfortunately.)

It reminded me that once upon a time not all that long ago (jk, as the kids say; it's still happening today) people took literature waaaaaaaaaaaay too seriously.  I will never get my head around the study and act of critiquing literature at an academic level, and I intensely studied it for four fucking years straight.

I'm not a complete idiot. I know that this is a necessary part of the process. And when I'm talking about critics, I don't mean someone reviewing something. I mean a legitimate deep study of something to see how it works, why it might not work and where its place is in society if it is even relevant. So yes, as with all other aspects of human life, study of literature is important. That kind of thing is just not for me, though. I'm more of a Vonnegut kind of guy in that regard. I do the work mostly for entertainment's sake, but I also think it's important to throw in some deeper meaning, too, for those who look for that. I look for that, so that's what I would want.

And I apply everything from the previous paragraph to stuff that a lot of people don't think is literature, like the kind of thing I write. Studying genre fiction might be even more important because it's easy to be deceived by such Trojan horses as werewolves or alien cultures or even the Middle Age feudal society you've got going on in the background of your Harlequin romance. A lot of those critics I talked about? They're only interested in lit-rit-chure, so they're not going to do it. It has to be someone else. Maybe . . . NOPE. Not me.

Either way, I'd want nothing to do with it, personally. If I wouldn't read it for fun, I wouldn't write it. That's been a promise of mine since I graduated said college. Back then I had to write SO. MUCH. SHIT. That I didn't want to write. At that point I'd done it all my life, and it was no longer a requirement. So I stopped.

If you want to do it, feel free. It's just not my thing.