(Not That You Asked) (24 page)

Of course, Sarvas was also taking notes. Aside from bashing me, here is the sum total of what he had to say on his blog:

On the subject of the short story, the panel is moderated by Novelist/Blogger and former The Elegant Variation guest host Tod Goldberg; the other participants include Aimee Bender, Bret Anthony Johnston and Merill [
sic
] Joan Gerber.

Tod keeps it light, querying the authors on everything from peanut butter preferences to whipped cream references…We also learn Tod has a short story collection coming out in September…but apparently
Tin House
won’t publish him…Aimee Bender apparently brought a cheering section, as the room erupted into cheers at her introduction…Tod identifies her as crush-worthy for smart 13 year olds…The most notable thing to us is that Gerber has published seven collections of short stories…seven collections…we wonder how on earth she manages to get them published…(Forget the seven novels she’s also published…) Over the years, Redbook published 42 of her stories…

ATTENDING THE PANEL
had forced Sarvas to confront his actual role in the literary order: He was a pretender, a person who lacked the dedication Bret Johnston spoke of, and who therefore had created his own narrative (the blog) in which the essential topic was not literature at all, but his own towering envy.
Why them? Why not me?

It came as no surprise that his “coverage” of the event read like a Page Six dispatch. Nor that his loyal readers felt well served by this summary. What astonished me was that Tod Goldberg, our moderator, responded. “Thanks for providing coverage,” he wrote. “And wonderful as always to see you out causing trouble.”

Why would Goldberg—a fine writer and genuinely thoughtful guy—offer such a comment? I suspect because he views Sarvas as someone who might help his career. The same is true of Jim Ruland. Whatever they think of his ad hominems, in the end they kiss his ass.

Publishers have started doing the same thing. If you want an index of just how desperate the industry has grown, look no further than the rise of the lit blogger as a phenomenon. Some are even parlaying their blogs into book deals. Why? In part, because publishers are drawn in by the mystique of the Internet and the notion that an author has a built-in—what is the word the marketing people use? Ah yes, here it is
—platform.

To be clear: Some bloggers also happen to be terrific writers. They use their blogs to undertake the honest labor of self-reflection. The improvisational form activates their love of the language. But many bloggers are simply too lazy and insecure to risk making art, to release their deepest emotions onto a blank page with no promise of recognition. So they launch a blog instead.

I can understand the temptation. It’s one I feel every day. Sarvas horrifies me precisely because he represents certain desires that live inside me: the desire to avoid the solitude and humiliation of sustained creative work, to find a shortcut to fame.

Does that turn you on, Sarvas? You’re
inside
me.

THE LIT BLOGGERS
out there will, I suspect, eagerly interpret the foregoing as a blanket condemnation of blogging. It is not. My beef isn’t with the medium, but those who glibly abuse its privileges. (Or, as I prefer to think of them: assholes who blog.)

Twenty years ago these guys were, for the most part, struggling writers whose assholic notions were limited to friends, family, and those unfortunate souls they encountered at cocktail parties. Today, they get to broadcast these notions to the world, under the banner of “lit blogging.”

All of which raises the question: Why do so many people read lit blogs?

To begin with, not
so many
people read them. Instead, a very concentrated population read them over and over. Namely, other bloggers. They all read one another, in the hope something they mentioned on their blog will be cited on another blog. It’s a kind of Ponzi scheme in which the object is attention, and the shared illusion is one of relevance.

Of course, plenty of aspiring writers and publishing folks also read lit blogs. With coverage of books all but disappearing from corporate media, these sites serve as instant clearinghouses for news items, local readings, and reviews. Many (Sarvas’s included) advocate for favorite writers. They allow people to feel connected to the world of letters.

All this is perfectly commendable. At their finest, these blogs contribute to a serious discussion of literature and the world at large, which is why I happily write pieces for the more thoughtful ones. But lit bloggers also have a tendency to boil that world down to a series of conflicts and controversies. Reading them often becomes a legitimized form of scandalmongering, a chance to revel in the failings of others.

The impulse is natural enough. The modern writer is engaged in an enterprise almost guaranteed to crush the spirit. Blogs merely serve as bulletin boards for the resulting feelings of despair and envy. Their chosen topic happens to be literature, but it could just as well be sports or politics.

In this sense, Sarvas has less in common with his hero James Wood than he does with Rush Limbaugh. Both are part of a burgeoning culture of grievance. They engage their audiences not through serious critical analysis of their alleged domain (policy, literature) but through a demagogue’s excitation of spite. If this era has proved anything, it’s that the demagogues win unless you smack them back.

FOR THOSE OF YOU
wondering why I would lavish all these words on a twerp like Sarvas, there’s your answer. I am well aware that in the process, I have made a dream come true for the guy. Yes, he has officially infiltrated my world. And all it took was two years of sustained slander.

He hasn’t realized this—and he never will—but his subconscious motive for attacking me was the hope that I would someday write this very piece. He envisioned something truly vicious, something he could feed off for a good long time. I’ve tried to oblige. But I’m also going to offer him something he wasn’t bargaining for: my forgiveness.

I don’t mean pity. I do pity the guy. But that’s a condescending posture, and it only gets you halfway to the truth. I mean
forgiveness.
I forgive the guy for hating me so much. If I were in his position, I would feel the same way. And I have. I’ve felt the same burning jealousy he has, toward those writers whose artistic and commercial success shames me. If I haven’t broadcast those feelings to the world, it is only because my act is a little more polished than his.

But we’re basically the same guy. We both face the same doomed task: to write in an era that has turned away from the written word. I wish Sarvas the best. May his finest motives win out in the end. That would be a triumph no one could ever take away from him, or diminish. Shit man, it might even be a work of art.
¹

HEART RADICAL

I
can’t remember the particulars, how it started with Barry Hannah. I’m pretty sure I was in grad school, turning my tender ambition at words into an endless feud. Nothing made much sense. I lived in the South (how had I wound up in the South?) in this crappy carriage house with a mattress on the floor. I cooked quesadillas over an open gas flame and drank cherry Coke from the big bottle. From time to time, a lady spent the night, but she always smelled the loneliness and I couldn’t bring myself to beg. My stories were great gray puddles of blah.

I was working so hard at being a laudable young writer, but no one was giving me any eggs. I wasn’t getting what I deserved. I was getting
ripped off.
So every day I sat there in that broiling apartment, in a fog of resentment, pumping out B.O. and wondering when things were going to change. Someone must have read the symptoms, or maybe I had the good sense to go to the library on my own—whatever the case, I found myself with a paperback of
Airships,
dating to 1979 and showing all of those years.

The first line I read was this:

“My head’s burning off and I got a heart about to bust out of my ribs.”

You’ll have to remember that this was in grad school, where, by no exact fault of anyone on the premises, the herd was pushed (and pushed itself) in the direction of serious and subtle prose, where the high crime of any workshop was overt emotionalism, the abject declaration that what we were up to
mattered.

So there was Barry Hannah and his weird, scampering, unstoppable blood leaping against all that.

“I got to be a man again,” he wrote.

And: “When it comes off, I see she’s got great humpers in her bra.”

And: “Everyone is getting crazier on the craziness of simply being too far from home for decent return.”

He was a guy in whose presence I could actually, finally,
breathe.
It didn’t matter that his stories were loose and Southern and baroque—things I would never be—only that they were authentic. And this wasn’t because of his great bulging brain (like Faulkner) or his macho restraint (like Hemingway). It was because he used language to express extreme feeling states with such naked precision. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that his extreme feeling states summoned the language. I knew this much: His insides were soft and red, like a tomato. It was that way for both of us. Only he was able, somehow, to make gorgeous frescoes where I made only pulp.

I read
Airships
chronically, maybe a dozen times, and each time I wanted to lick the pages. Those stories! All full of death and sex and grotesque types chewing to the end of their tethers. What kind of world was this? Why, in the face of such pain and humiliation, did I want never to leave them?

I can remember the long August days of nothing, the dumb, stoned parties, my idiot heart clutching at anyone who came close and driving them off. I was living in the Bible. Everything was wrath and betrayal. I took it all twice as hard. I shaved my head. I wanted to look like the freak I was.

There was one party in particular, later on, in autumn. This was the night I was supposed to consummate matters with my love interest, a fraudulent poet with a nice big caboose. The energy between us was deep and crazy. We were going to electrocute one another with desire. We were going to bleed the same blood. But before I could touch her in any real way, she turned away and fled into the sticky night, and another friend, just about to dump me also, stared down at the concrete pilings of my porch and said, “Well, you know, you
are
kind of a train wreck.”

Everyone else left too, off to be happy and normal, to dream in placid colors, and I went inside my place and looked at the mess from the party, the beer bottle ashtrays and burnt tortillas, and my ears were ringing with the hurt. I was disgusted with myself: my dull sentences, my social failures, my inability to feel less about the world.

Those were the nights I sought out
Airships.
I’d sit there and read a sentence like “I’m going to die from love” and start crying. And what’s strange is that it felt so good to cry, there was a kind of joy in it, because all feeling is joy, because the capacity for feeling is the great unstated human achievement, and because somewhere, off in the distance, I could see that my capacity to feel wasn’t going to mess me up forever, and that someday, if I kept at it, the writing thing, if I kept myself open to the lashings of the world, the true, brutal hurt of the place, I might start to get somewhere.

So that’s what
Airships
was about for me: coming out of hiding as an emotionalist. Realizing that, amid the vanities and elisions of the Southern literary tradition, there was a deep, Christian possibility: that confession might actually cure, that love might act as a revolutionary force, that the chaos of one’s past and present, if fully experienced, might portend some glowing future.

All of which sounds hopelessly lofty. All I mean is that reading the guy made me a more forgiving person. There’s room in this world for all of us freaks.

PRETTY AUTHORS MAKE GRAVES

There’s a helluva lot more of us…than you.

—FRANK ZAPPA

I
was an ugly kid. Buck teeth. Fat cheeks. Bad hair.
Terrible
hair. You look at the old albums and it’s a museum of bad hair. I should have had myself shellacked.

But listen: Most of the good writers out there are ugly. Butt ugly. Plug ugly.
Fugly.
I’d give you a long list of examples, but I’m not interested in research. Research bores me. You know what I’m talking about, anyway. All that literary dogmeat. Except for Faulkner. Faulkner was hot. But he was a drunk, and he was mean to his kids.

I only trust the ugly writers, anyway. Deep down, those are the ones who have earned their wrath. All the rest of them, the pretty boy and girl authors, fuck them. Or, better yet, don’t fuck them. Get them all hot and bothered. Tell them you know Terry Gross, you once dated her former personal assistant, then leave them there, lathered up and grinning in a hot cloud of their own fabulous bone structure.