Talking in Memphis

Literary prose, memory holes, more yums

I’m late this month, but I’m on sabbatical. I barely know what day it is. It’s been an odd month. Since before Thanksgiving, I’ve been back on the road, seeing old friends. I had Thanksgiving with my friend Connor’s family. The night before, we went to a dive bar in Phoenix and I said, “that bartender looks just like a guy I went to high school with.” Turns out it was; we got lunch a few days later. In between, I hung out with my friend Marques and his family, who I’ve known since second grade. I can’t recommend old friends enough. You just slip back into being your truest self.

Anyway. Last month, before all of that, I did a reading at the University of Memphis. Like most things Memphian, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I hadn’t visited an MFA program in a while and that one has good vibes. I also got to read a newish essay about growing up in trailers, which is in the new issue of River Teeth.¹

While I was there, I had, for the first time in a long time, a lot of interesting conversations about memoirs. Those conversations are always fraught with concerns about literariness. A lot of the most common questions people who are working on a memoir ask people who’ve written one—how to find a voice, for example, a question someone asked after the reading—depend, in one way or another, on how literary you want it to be.

I don’t think anyone really knows what literary means. I see people quote passages all the time and say how beautiful or gorgeous the writing is, but they’ll almost never explain why, I suspect because many of them can’t. Academics aren’t a lot better at defining it. The book excerpt I linked to last month calls literary fiction “fiction that privileges art over entertainment.” The nonfiction equivalent might be something like true writing that privileges art over information.² But those don’t actually do much to clarify the concept. What’s the distinction? Who decides? Etc.

In practice, people seem to think that literary writing is defined, at least in large part, by the prose.³ But nobody really agrees what defines good prose; it’s wildly subjective. A while back I got into a debate with a friend and colleague—a person I like, whose writing and taste I respect—who hates Blood Meridian. He said the prose is too dense and lacks interiority or some such thing. I disagree—do I ever—but I get it. I feel that way about other people’s favorite literary books all the time.

For example, I recently read a book a dozen different people must have recommended to me over the years. It’s by a famous writer. It won awards. It’s about as literary as it gets. Here’s what I think is a representative passage:

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.

I can see why people say that’s good. The way it sounds—the assonance, alliteration, rhythm—and the dense, distinctive imagery. But I don’t like it at all. It feels purple and portentous, like it’s trying to convey some profound insight that isn’t there. I find myself asking, what does that mean? Are peaches little more than bright globes of water? Can need blossom into all the compensations it requires?⁴ I could go on, but you get the point.

Here, on the other hand, is a passage from another literary novel I recently read, written by a similar writer in terms of age/race/gender/fame/etc:

The winter had not brought rain and there were no flowers, there would be no flowers. Still, the land in the spring of the year when Alice would turn sixteen could not be said to be suffering from drought. The desert knew no drought, really. Anything so habitual and prolonged was simply life—a life invisible and anticipatory. What was germinative would only remain so that spring. What was possible was neither dead nor alive. Relief had been promised, of course.

That passage is similar in many ways: it also describes a landscape, offers some potentially vague insights, and contains a lot of elevated syntax and Latinate diction, hallmarks of writing that’s trying too hard to be literary. So why do I like it so much better?

It probably helps that the landscape in question is my favorite one. But it’s also the prose itself, its leanness and precision. There isn’t a single metaphor or simile in that paragraph.⁵ Because of that, those sentences move in a way the first passage’s don’t. Maybe my favorite thing is that I don’t get the sense the writer is trying too hard to make Meaning.

I’m also not trying too hard to make meaning, so if you were waiting for some insightful takeaway, I’m sorry to disappoint. That second quote is from Joy Williams’ The Quick and the Dead, which I liked, but is not for everybody. I’m not going to say who the first one was because I don’t want people getting salty about it.

Some things I liked this month:

• I’ve been reading up on memory lately, as research for an essay I’ve been working on and as part of a student’s thesis project. So I really enjoyed this Sallie Tisdale essay in Harper’s about the mechanics and accuracy of memory, or lack thereof.

• The snack-box plot has thickened; in addition to the aforementioned Bokksu, I’ve signed us up for Universal Yums. It’s less surprising, larger-portioned, and not as elegantly presented as Bokksu. It also uses “yums” as a noun, which feels like a real decision. But you get a new country or region every month. The first box, from Greece, was heavy on breadsticks, but Scandinavia was much better than I expected. Who knew Swedish potato chips went so hard?

• I’d guess not many people reading this are applying to MFA programs, but just in case, my friend Dave Madden has been writing a series on the process for his Substack. He’s been reading applications for many years, and his advice is much better than most of what’s out there.

• As a secret JFK conspiracy theorist—don’t get me started—I loved this long, dense, and wild New York piece by Scott Sayare that reveals some interesting new information.

• I’ve been tracking the budget crisis at my alma mater, the University of Arizona. It’s not a good sign when your president is floating the idea of cutting sports or privatizing athletics, among other "draconian" cuts. He almost sounds like WVU’s Gordon Gee, who is fast becoming the Mr. Burns of public university administrators. 

• Anyone who’s taught at the college level probably already knows this, but I appreciated this (possibly freewalled) Chronicle of Higher Ed article about the racism, sexism, and counterproductivity of student evaluations. Yet they’re still widely used to evaluate professors—in many cases, as the only real way to evaluate them. As the article puts it, “evaluations are a kind of disciplinary tool, a stick management uses to make sure the faculty satisfies the customers.”

• Not really a recommendation, but I have to send my Pushcart nominations by next week, so if you want to recommend a piece—ideally an essay, whether yours or someone else’s—please do.

• If you made it this far, I also made a Spotify playlist of some favorite songs from 2023. I was less into music this year than any in a long time, and a lot of this isn’t new. But here you go. See you next year.

1. I don’t think they publish full pieces online, but you can read it here if you have Project Muse access through your library, or subscribe. Or let me know and I’ll send you a pdf.

2. This is not how I would define it.

3. You could also define it by its lack of plot or momentum compared to “genre” writing, but that’s a topic for another day.

4. These kinds of questions are why I was unpopular in my MFA workshops.

5. The overreliance on comparative devices is another common way writing tries too hard to be literary. As a professor of mine once said, is anything really like anything else?