I read somewhere - it might have been The Sound on the Page by Ben Yagoda - that late-20th century writers tended to fall two camps: those who mimicked Hemingway, and those who tried vehemently to escape him. His ‘voice’ was too damn infectious. Which brings to mind another late-20th c. observation that all writers suffer an ‘anxiety of influence’. But it’s certainly true that the prevailing anxieties are different now: social, ecological, etc. Still, I’m not sure I buy Marche’s tidy dichotomy. I’ve not read Rooney, but Moshfegh for one oozes Voice.
Yeah. The Hemingway Dialectic! The absolute cacophony of the digital age seems like it may fragment and /or swamp many of these distinctions, which is a generational distinction its own, and I dont really know how to wrap my mind around it. I haven't read Moshfegh yet but I do agree Marche's taxonomy is probably leaky at best, but I did think it was getting at something real, if not as broadly applicable as he makes it. From what I've read I like Rooney actually, I probably didn't come across that way. Mostly I just wanted to riff on the concept for the purpose of working out my own thoughts, which are probably incoherent.
Yeah it's hard to make sense of it, but I think it's true that there's been a generational tidal shift, and you're right that there's something panoptical about it.
On that point, Deresiewicz writes of the boomer/millennial contrast: ‘Now the fans are in the driver’s seat; now it is the artists who are weeping and screaming with need.’
And in terms of pose:
‘Around your comics or stories or songs, you fashion a portfolio of goods and services that you can actually charge some money for, plus a cloud of images and audio and text to draw and keep your fans. You build up a persona and a narrative. All of which changes how art is positioned, what it is and means... The [corporate, boomer-era] suits used to package you; the Internet expects you to arrive self-packaged.’
Perhaps the cacophony comes from the panopticon being converted into a fairground! ;-)
The fandom angle seems important, and circles us back to previous discussion of fans/haters/parasocial relationships. In ye olden times, only celebrities were packaged into projected personas...now many more of us see or imagine ourselves that way, in some diluted sense, just in the course of normal life...something about the democratization of celebrity ....warhol's 15 minutes of fame comment except now the fame is just the threat of going viral on twitter...
Something I just remembered, and a good candidate for Marche's game, is the first sentence of Adam Ehrlich Sachs's 2019 novel: 'In an account sent to the Philosophical Transactions but for some reason never published there, or anywhere else, a young G. W. Leibniz, who throughout his life was an assiduous inquirer into miracles and other aberrations of nature, related the odd and troubling encounter he had with a certain astronomer who’d predicted that at noon on the last day of June 1666, the brightest time of day at nearly the brightest time of year, the Moon would pass very briefly, but very precisely, between the Sun and the Earth, casting all of Europe for one instant in absolute darkness, “a darkness without equal in our history, but lasting no longer than four seconds,” the astronomer predicted, according to Leibniz, an eclipse that no other astronomer in Europe was predicting, and which, Leibniz explained, drew his notice in part because the astronomer in question, whose observations of the planets and the fixed stars were supposedly among the most accurate and the most precise ever made, superior to Tycho’s, was blind, and “not merely completely blind,” Leibniz wrote (in my translation from the Latin), “but in fact entirely without eyes.” ' — The Organs of Sense
I read somewhere - it might have been The Sound on the Page by Ben Yagoda - that late-20th century writers tended to fall two camps: those who mimicked Hemingway, and those who tried vehemently to escape him. His ‘voice’ was too damn infectious. Which brings to mind another late-20th c. observation that all writers suffer an ‘anxiety of influence’. But it’s certainly true that the prevailing anxieties are different now: social, ecological, etc. Still, I’m not sure I buy Marche’s tidy dichotomy. I’ve not read Rooney, but Moshfegh for one oozes Voice.
Yeah. The Hemingway Dialectic! The absolute cacophony of the digital age seems like it may fragment and /or swamp many of these distinctions, which is a generational distinction its own, and I dont really know how to wrap my mind around it. I haven't read Moshfegh yet but I do agree Marche's taxonomy is probably leaky at best, but I did think it was getting at something real, if not as broadly applicable as he makes it. From what I've read I like Rooney actually, I probably didn't come across that way. Mostly I just wanted to riff on the concept for the purpose of working out my own thoughts, which are probably incoherent.
Yeah it's hard to make sense of it, but I think it's true that there's been a generational tidal shift, and you're right that there's something panoptical about it.
On that point, Deresiewicz writes of the boomer/millennial contrast: ‘Now the fans are in the driver’s seat; now it is the artists who are weeping and screaming with need.’
And in terms of pose:
‘Around your comics or stories or songs, you fashion a portfolio of goods and services that you can actually charge some money for, plus a cloud of images and audio and text to draw and keep your fans. You build up a persona and a narrative. All of which changes how art is positioned, what it is and means... The [corporate, boomer-era] suits used to package you; the Internet expects you to arrive self-packaged.’
Perhaps the cacophony comes from the panopticon being converted into a fairground! ;-)
But a fairground is so cheerful!! :)
The fandom angle seems important, and circles us back to previous discussion of fans/haters/parasocial relationships. In ye olden times, only celebrities were packaged into projected personas...now many more of us see or imagine ourselves that way, in some diluted sense, just in the course of normal life...something about the democratization of celebrity ....warhol's 15 minutes of fame comment except now the fame is just the threat of going viral on twitter...
I meant, it's still a prison though. It's festive, but the artists are in the cages and the acoustics are terrible.
Or something like the hostage videos on cameo.com
That is...a strange website.
Something I just remembered, and a good candidate for Marche's game, is the first sentence of Adam Ehrlich Sachs's 2019 novel: 'In an account sent to the Philosophical Transactions but for some reason never published there, or anywhere else, a young G. W. Leibniz, who throughout his life was an assiduous inquirer into miracles and other aberrations of nature, related the odd and troubling encounter he had with a certain astronomer who’d predicted that at noon on the last day of June 1666, the brightest time of day at nearly the brightest time of year, the Moon would pass very briefly, but very precisely, between the Sun and the Earth, casting all of Europe for one instant in absolute darkness, “a darkness without equal in our history, but lasting no longer than four seconds,” the astronomer predicted, according to Leibniz, an eclipse that no other astronomer in Europe was predicting, and which, Leibniz explained, drew his notice in part because the astronomer in question, whose observations of the planets and the fixed stars were supposedly among the most accurate and the most precise ever made, superior to Tycho’s, was blind, and “not merely completely blind,” Leibniz wrote (in my translation from the Latin), “but in fact entirely without eyes.” ' — The Organs of Sense
Very good! The lost art of the long, unspooling, internally digressive but ultimately coherent sentence!