Neoliberal nonfiction, NBA bandwagoning, Japanese snacks
Sometime around fifteen years ago, somewhat unconsciously, I switched over from writing and teaching exclusively fiction to writing and teaching almost exclusively nonfiction. By then I’d gotten an MFA in fiction, done a postgrad fellowship in the subject, taught it for a few years, and had written only fiction more or less1 since I’d started taking writing seriously. But then I wrote a first book of nonfiction, and although I didn’t understand this at the time, your first book sort of defines you, to academia and to the world; since it came out, ten years ago, I haven’t taught a fiction class.
That’s probably for the best. It took me perhaps too long to realize that I never liked literary fiction that much, or maybe just never liked that much of it.2 I’d also long felt like the more contemporary nonfiction I was exposed to, the more it seemed like documentary forms were more innovative, interesting, and relevant to the broader culture. The best book I read this month, Daniel Worden’s Neoliberal Nonfictions: the Documentary Aesthetic from Joan Didion to Jay-Z, may have helped explain why.
Daniel and I were briefly colleagues years ago, when I was a visiting prof at the University of New Mexico. We were friendly, and I knew we had similar interests—at the time, he’d just published his first book, about literary modernism and masculinity in the American West, topics near to my heart—but I didn’t understand just how similar until I read this book.
Its thesis, which the book supports with a wide range of case studies, is that the “documentary aesthetic,” which he defines as a mode of making art rather than a form in itself, emerged in the ’60s as a way of using personal experience to critique major structural forces and explain the surreal feeling of living under neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is a fraught term, and I’m certainly not an authority on the subject. Insofar as I understand it, it’s basically the idea of treating everything as a marketplace—think of social media turning us all into brands,3 the dismantling of American journalism (and higher ed) by private capital, and so on—and/or the historical era in which that has happened, which usually seems to be defined as post-WWII, post-Nixon, or post-Reagan/Thatcher. But by this point, at least in my milieu, the word has been overused to the point that it often seems to mean both everything and nothing. For me, someone who can’t confidently define it but has lived his whole life under it, neoliberalism is largely a feeling: of narrowing opportunities, constant surveillance and extraction, rampaging inequality, lesser-evil politics, total impunity for capital, and so on.
Worden argues that the documentary aesthetic emerged as a way of representing that feeling, the “state of vertigo and displacement” that defines life in neoliberal America. He also devotes sections to true crime and the contemporary memoir,4 both of which were especially interesting to me. I would go on, but I don’t have the book to reference—I gave it to my friend Charlie, whose documentary class in grad school was so formative for me that I wrote the first section of my last book about it—so you’ll just have to read for yourself.
Go Grizz
I’m not much of a pro basketball fan. I follow the Sixers from afar, and watch them in the playoffs, but—as is the case for all Philly teams lately—their annual postseason choke jobs have begun to grate. But I’ve been spending time in Memphis, the NBA season just started, and my lady friend has partial season tickets to the Grizzlies, so we’ve been watching a lot of games—or at least, we have when Bally Sports manages to work. I think I’m a Grizzlies fan now.
As much as I usually don’t respect bandwagon fans, it feels more acceptable to take up the cause of a franchise that’s never won anything meaningful and which is currently in last place; if not for a rousing 26-2 run to close the game last night in Portland, they’d be 0-7 right now. There’s also something charming about a city with only one pro sports team—you would not believe the amount of TV and radio airtime spent on the Grizzlies around here—and about the team itself.
Their head coach is a balding, thirtysomething econ major named Taylor. One of the assistants is Vitaly “The Ukraine Train” Potapenko, who for some reason is tasked with giving totally unintelligible halftime interviews. Their best player is currently suspended because he can’t stop flashing guns. One of their active players is 5’8”. Another one is 300 pounds. Their mascot makes no sense at all; as weird as the Utah Jazz sounds, at least there’s apparently actual jazz in Salt Lake. As someone who appreciates a ragtag franchise—let’s not discuss the month my Phillies just had—how could I not love this team?
Then there’s Desmond Bane, probably their best active player, who’s an absolute wrecking ball, the kind of max-effort guy you can’t help but root for. He’s been singlehandedly keeping them in games, and took over in the fourth quarter the other night to lead them to their first win. He’s sort of the anti-James Harden: young, unselfish, great defender, exceptional conditioning, clutch, likable. If he were a Sixer, he’d be my favorite player. He might be, anyway.
A few other things I’ve recently liked:
My compatriot in Grizzlies Nation also recently introduced me to Bokksu, the monthly subscription service that sends you curated boxes of Japanese snacks. It might be my favorite thing in the world.
Speaking of my bygone days as a fiction teacher, I forgot to link to this when it came out in May, but last spring I spoke to Stanford Magazine for this profile of Brit Bennett, who was a student in the first fiction workshop I ever taught solo.
I’m not a big Talking Heads guy, as the movie confirmed, but I saw the restored Stop Making Sense with Charlie, on the big screen, and can see why it’s often called the best concert film ever made. Other movies I especially liked this month: Edward Yang’s languorous Yi Yi, Hitchcock’s ludicrous The Lady Vanishes, and everything except the last five minutes of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas.
This piece on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, improvisational art, online communities, and literary writing, by recent OSU grad Jeremy Klemin.
Jeremy actually pointed me to this new Harper’s essay by William Vollman. His work is sort of an acquired taste, and I don’t always love it, but it feels so distinctive and strange to me, unlike what anyone else is doing.
I can’t remember how I came upon it—I didn’t previously know the publication or the writer—but I also liked this essay about loneliness, solitary confinement, therapy, and more.
Speaking of neoliberalism, I appreciated this episode of The American Vandal podcast. It’s nice to know some other academics are paying attention as private capital sinks its fangs into universities, endangering basically everyone who actually teaches or studies at them.
I originally wanted to be a journalist, but by the time I graduated from college, the writing was on the wall for journalism careers, so I switched to the lucrative and in-demand field of creative writing.
It also took me a long time to understand what literary fiction meant. In the better part of a decade studying the subject, I’m not sure I ever heard anyone define it beyond asserting its literariness. To that end, I found this recent article, an excerpt from Dan Sinykin’s new book about the publishing industry, educational. Among the piece’s merits is that it actually defines the term, and outlines how it emerged as a result of material factors.
Which was never more obvious than this month, when a bunch of people with no connection to or particular knowledge of the situation in Gaza felt compelled to make public statements about it on social media, anyway.
He actually discusses my first book briefly near the end—although that’s truly not why I’m recommending his—and his analysis of a key passage made me feel like at least one reader understood exactly what I was trying to do.