george saunders

I could go on and on about him, but weirdly enough I think I'm going to sit back and wait for other people to say stuff about him and then come back and be all like "no you're wrong only I truly understand George Saunders."

We should probably have some sort of poll on how conflicted we feel about Saunders working on a Ben Stiller version of CivilWarLand.

saunders is my FAVORITE contemporary author, hands down, and he hasn't even written a novel. i don't care if he isnt capable of writing one.

anyone who hasn't read civilwarland in bad decline needs to get to the bookstore immediately!

he uses different techniques in every story, and they are never particularly pleasant. EVERY one of his stories i have ever read has been disorienting at first, but once you get a grasp of the syntax he is using, you can ease into it...

i don't think he ever intends his language to be aesthetically beautiful.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1440901,00.html

i like Saunders. his language is not "beautiful" but he can capture an image so cleanly and directly that it gives you a jolt and that's where the beauty lies.

take the murder scene from "Isabelle":

Officer Doyle said let's interrogate. Split Lip said i'll show you interrogation. He pushed the teen into the lagoon and held him under. With his club Doyle made Norris watch. The teen's hands slapped and slapped. Then Split Lip stood up and the dead teen floated.

that's the whole scene! that's utterly incredible to me, so much achieved so simply. the scene in "the Wavemaker Falters" where the boy gets churned up in the blades of the wave machine works in a similar way.

his stories are interesting because his cold language seems at odds with his love and empathy for the characters - it verges on sentimentality at times (and i mean that as a compliment). e.g. the point in "Isabelle" where the narrator reveals Boneless's real name "a pretty, pretty name". or in "Civilwarland..." where the narrator gets stabbed right at the end of the story and he thinks of his children and his wife "Sweet Evelyn... i should have loved you better" before hovering over his own death scene (as a ghost) and seeing the traumas his own killer endured as a child. it's breathtaking.

also, he's very funny!

i never finished the novella in "Civilwarland..." though.

it's not often a book can give me chills or make me feel emotional. this scene especially did that to me the first time i read it.

But the thing is that he's not just making fun of that kind of speech, and not just satirizing the "ugliness" of it -- in the end, George is always-always big bleeding-heart empathizer, and at his best he uses that language to cut right into how his characters think, and what they're all about. "Sea Oak" is terrific for that: there's a rich uncle who spouts optimistic banalities about hard work in such a way that you feel he believes it, you understand him -- and even better, when the aunt's grave is desecrated, Saunders pegs the entire role of the policeman simply by putting question marks at the end of his sentences. (I wish I had the book here to quote: I think he says "Typically we find it's teens?" and in that question mark you hear everything -- the desire to be helpful and reassuring, and the complete powerlessness to actually be helpful and reassuring.) Saunders really gets into this kind of language stuff whenever he dips into the language of work, hence my love of the first of his "Four Institutional Monologues," which is possibly another issue.

But just language itself, just the sheer joy of doing gorgeous things with the words -- he's kind of got it, even if it's in his own way. He loves our twisted commonplace constructions ("I personally would love that and you know that. . . . But who would not love that is our landlord"), he loves constructions that make sense even though they shouldn't ("too much grief, as we all know, is excessive"), and above all he love-love-loves the language of exhortation and the inevitable rhetorical questions that come along with it: half of the characters in his stories speak in nearly nothing but strings of rhetorical questions. (E.g., the self-improvement speaker: "Now, if someone came up and crapped in your nice warm oatmeal, what would you say? Would you say: 'Wow, super, thanks, please continue crapping in my oatmeal'? Am I being silly? I'm being a little silly. But guess what, in real life people come up and crap in your oatmeal all the time -— friends, co-workers, loved ones, even your kids, especially your kids! -— and that's exactly what you do. You say, 'Thanks so much!' You say, 'Crap away!' You say, and here my metaphor breaks down a bit, 'Is there some way I can help you crap in my oatmeal?'"

And so there you have Saunders-characters in a world of that, and consider this: who else really writes with as much of a moral attachment to banal everyday American life? Oh, yes, he's funny, but the fact is that something like 80% of his first two books consisted of stories about the same thing: people working terrible jobs for necessary money, and making moral decisions about where exactly that becomes a problem. (The other 20% = people who can't get other people to like them!) And the worthwhile thing about this guy has far less to do with the language than it has to do with his skill in making those concerns work, with getting that big bleeding heart to function perfectly in a shocking number of his stories. On the surface, they seem like they might be jokes about schlubs and grotesques and comical losers in comical situations, but they near-immediately become about genuine moral crisis, and the last story in Pastoralia feels like the best indicator of exactly that: it gives us the comical schlub, running through his everday fantasies of people actually liking him for a change, and then he spots two girls trapped in a canoe and about to tip over a waterfall, and the damn thing ends with him stripping down to swim out and try to save them, thinking as he does it that he'll never make it there, he'll obviously drown. That's the moral life of the Saunders character, really, and it comes up in little details everywhere -- I'm looking over "Sea Oak" online and it's everywhere, in the sad bitterness of the zombie aunt, but most of all in a little reminiscence of a high-school girlfriend: "Angela had dreams. She had plans. In her notebook she pasted a picture of an office from the J. C. Penney catalogue and under it wrote, My (someday?) office." Lovely! What more empathy do you want for basic human hopes and dreams than that! And so how exactly like life does it seem that the only other thing Angela writes, a break-up note, begins with just a string of cliches: "You will always be my first love. . . . But now my path converges to a higher ground. Be well always. Walk in joy."

And so yes, I love Saunders, because the more that I think about it, the better of an idea he seems. He sees the modern world and modern language in a way that's unique but at the same time easily-accessible to everyone else around him. He's base-level funny enough to potentially be incredibly super-popular, which would be a terrific thing for literature. And if it happened, we wouldn't even have to complain about how he's a bad candidate for it, because he isn't: inside his stuff is a writerly moral sense and a genuine gut-level sense of meaning that do things other media have lots of trouble with.

New Yorkers, Saunders doing a reading at the Chelsea 6th Ave B&N this Monday.

Anyway: I dunno if it's a story of a woman "going to pieces," since the whole point of it lies in the opposite surface impression -- that she comes back collected, functional, no-nonsense, and full of plans. She also comes back a monster. So I don't know if "to pieces" is a very good way of putting it: she's more of an exaggerated shade of the uncle (or stepfather?), whose success seems to have come at the expense of something that the narrator would prefer to hold on to. A lot of Saunders' stories are very similar, but there's actually a level on which I like seeing him work with that consistency of concern: "Sea Oak," like everything else, becomes about what exactly it would mean "becoming" to get ahead, how much needs to be sacrificed to accomplish it, and whether the steps required to accomplish it are the right way to situate one's mind at all.

And the thing that separates Saunders from how most of yr Woods-style hysterical-realists on this is where he comes down on that, and how naturally -- the guy does try to accomplish it, somewhat sadly, and somewhat because he can't explain to the ghost why life isn't fair (and maybe doesn't want to have to not-explain the same thing to his nephews).

Hysterical realism is not exactly magical realism, but magical realism's next stop. It is characterised by a fear of silence. This kind of realism is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page. There is a pursuit of vitality at all costs. Recent novels by Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and others have featured a great rock musician who played air guitar in his crib (Rushdie); a talking dog, a mechanical duck and a giant octagonal cheese (Pynchon); a nun obsessed with germs who may be a reincarnation of J Edgar Hoover (DeLillo); a terrorist group devoted to the liberation of Quebec who move around in wheelchairs (Foster Wallace); and a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with the silly acronym Kevin (Smith).

Which is not bad as a genre for a critic to identify, but there are times when his stern disapproval of the thing amounts to saying "god damn it, these young writers are trying to be funny and entertaining and take childish delight in the very acts of writing and reading," which I'm not sure is really the most productive way to criticize that stuff; one of the good things about Smith was some pure gut-level vitality in the writing, some feeling of joy and freedom in the acts of reading and writing themselves -- not terrible things to introduce into literature right now.

Plus it bleeds over into going "oh, whatever, hysterical realism" every time someone tries to do anything fun at all -- Saunders is a pretty focused (even samey!) short-story writer, not a scattered hysteric, but he brings one old lady back from the dead and it's all "yeah, hysterics."

(There remains a slight generational "thing" around that, actually, one that I never see older people acknowledge. Wallace had something interesting about that in his television essay, from, what, fifteen years ago? And still I'll see older people advise writing techniques such as introducing every character with an overview of appearance, to which some younger people invariably react badly: "If we cared what everyone looked like we'd be in the film program!")

Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs):

show your cock, sleek metal hole, lime crone, pink crone, attitudinal difficulties, bag from the bottom, heavy girl, your oatmeal, small bugs

I think Nab. sounds a bit daft saying: "one of the good things about Smith was some pure gut-level vitality in the writing". He sounds a bit like (heaven help me)... Dave Marsh. I don't think Wood is stern, particularly. He is an aesthete, with a limited patience for sociology/cultural theory/pomo posturing. To put it bluntly, he wants novels about people rather than novels about ideas. As such, he is a timely response to the over-rating of DFW in the US and, especially, Rushdie in the UK.

Funnily enough, Wood is younger than many of the HRers he criticises.

Zadie Smith has recently accepted Wood's criticism of her (though she defends Wallace against him) and seems to be moving towards a less "inventive" style, thank goodness.

Wood is no great fan of suburban realism - he has criticised Updike, and he likes Hamsun and Hrabal - but he dislikes the cartoonish element in serious fiction. For example, he criticises Smith for writing in places like Tom Sharpe:( '"Mickey . . .prised Samad's face off the hot glass with an egg slice." This kind of writing is closer to the 'low' comic style of a farceur like Tom Sharpe than it ought to be. It has a pertness, but it squanders itself in a mixture of banality and crudity.')

For me, the same tendency weakens Saunders. He is a gifted writer of sentences, but sometimes his sharpness cuts against itself: so, for me, parts of "Sea Oak" read two-dimensionally, and that interferes with my belief.

Anyway, I hadn't heard of this guy before this thread, and I went from being interested to being not so interested in him. I suppose I wouldn't kick him out of bed, at least not at first.

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200310/article_moffett.php

http://maudnewton.com/blog/?p=5610

Being about systems and ideas is one field where books have the advantage over film. But when it comes to whimsy, the book/film connection seems to be something else: the literary novel is officially Not Important Anymore. There's something so half-ridiculous about the fact of even writing one that it's easy to see where the whimsy comes in: what the hell, it's your novel, people hardly even read books anymore, might as well have fun with it. The problem here isn't whimsy, or "books about ideas" versus "books about people," but the fact that neither of those categories usually packs the ambition to say something grand and far-reaching and real.

Still, though, I'm sensitive to seeing someone congratulate a writer for being "less 'inventive'," despite the scare quotes. Why? Because I don't trust the way things are written off as whimsy or wacky when they very often mean something completely unwhimsical, both to writer and reader. Since this is a Saunders thread, "Sea Oak" again -- it has the tone that many would call whimsical, but I can't sort out a single element in it that doesn't seem focused and meaningful and directly relevant to something serious (and serious-minded) to say about people. So I sometimes read charges about "hysterical-realist" books as being like charges about "pretentious" bands -- sometimes they're spot-on, but all too often they're a way of dismissing some perception of "style" without even bothering to notice that it's actually genuine substance.

Naturally, I'm in favour of inventiveness that's natural and creative; but zaniness for the sake of it - like the talking turd in Frantzen, or the talking lawnmower in a story by Frances gapper that I read recently, or the relentless counter-realities in Eggars's flash fiction - strikes me as too easy. The hardest thing is to extrapolate from the real into something original, not to be original by sidestepping the real. I'm not against all surreal flights of fancy - I liked Arthur Bradford's "Dogwalker", for example - but I admit I prefer the writers who avoid it, for example Tobias Wolfe. I don't want to get polarised about this (I do like Saunders, and occasionally love him), but I'm uneasy about the relentless infiltration of fantasy tropes into literary fiction. (I'm just one of those people: as soon as a ghost, a miraculous occurrence, a post-modern conjuring trick, a metatextual irony, appears in a story, my heart sinks.)

(a) Isn't that stuff partly the result of the film era and the Coover dictum -- i.e., you should write stuff that can only be written? (I think this is an idiotic dictum, for the record, but I do understand why modern-day writing would select for people interested in only-in-fiction tricks.) But then more importantly:

(b) Can you defend this "relentless infiltration" line? Like I said, it's certainly a trend, and it's one associated with the highest-profile young writers today. But it's also a "trend" in the opposite sense -- it's a limited cadre. I mean, can we get past just saying "relentless" and "everywhere" and actually justify this idea that "everyone" is doing it? Because so far as I can see the bulk of fiction, high-lit and low-lit, remains as traditional as ever.

I think it might be even harder to sidestep the real and make it work for an audience who are only familiar with the real.

(And since "making it work" is a writer's job and not "keeping it real"...)

and hardly anyone would say that cream soda thing like that.

Arf. Saunders plays with those sorts of constructions all the time, yes. So can people like Wallace and Baker, when they want to. So does whoever writes The Gilmore Girls. Maybe I've been spending time in the wrong places, but so far as I know people often talk that way. It's normal, is what it is.

someone give us another weird attempt at vernacular we can argue over.

18. I think people could be encouraged to read through: Wearing "author" t-shirts, much like band t-shirts

And maybe George Saunders heard me, because check it out: go to reignofphil.com! You can buy Reign of Phil t-shirts! I have just purchased one.

I got the wig t-shirt, though, and got to be overjoyed when I came across the relevant part of the text. I guess for my high-lit t-shirt I will just have to get started on a Steven Millhauser Neighborhoodie. (Possibly it will say: "Rose Dorn / Rose Dorn / I am / forlorn.")

"Cruel freight" made me laugh.

x-post. I'm all for the Looney Tuney direction, not because of the anti-TV meme, but because the story seemed like a spirited amalgam of Twain and Barthelme.

"CommCom" was also pretty fucking solid.

Definitely the closest thing to Barthelme we've got going these days.

outtakes!

new collection:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=br_ss_hs/104-8034997-6351146?platform=gurupa&url=index%3Dblended&keywords=saunders&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go

i wonder what path george's career trajectory will take and how he will be remembered?

civilwarland seemed much better than pastoralia, however

NOSTALGIA
by GEORGE SAUNDERS
Issue of 2006-04-10
Posted 2006-04-03

The other day I was watching TV and it occurred to me that I’ve become a prude. The show in question was innocuous enough, nothing shocking—just an episode of “Hottie Leaders,” featuring computer simulations of what various female world leaders would look like naked and in the throes of orgasm—but somehow, between that and the Pizza Hut commercial where Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson engage in some “girl-on-girl” action in a vast field of pizza sauce, something snapped. I know what the problem is: I’m old. I came of age in a simpler sexual time.

Back in those ancient, prelapsarian days, “girl-on-girl” hadn’t even been invented yet. At that time, “girl-on-guy” had only recently been discovered. I remember my parents and their neighbors standing in the yard with a pair of crude human figures made of wood, trying to work out the details. Sometimes a couple would get all worked up and forget where things were supposed to go, and the husband would have to call a friend—only phones were new, too, so sometimes you’d go over to visit a pal from school and there’d be his dad, just standing there naked, phone in hand, totally flummoxed. Women could get pregnant from merely watching a kiss in a movie! Girls, or at least the “good girls,” would go to movies blindfolded. I remember once, in fourth grade, I had to get engaged to a girl whose coat I’d brushed up against in the cloakroom. Those were simpler times, but, in some ways, I think, better times.

Same deal with violence. I remember how stunned we all were when the Cain-and-Abel thing happened. What, what? we kept saying. He bludgeoned his brother? With a rock? I remember the first time a severed limb was shown on TV. People were running out of their houses screaming. And it was just a fake leg, in a cartoon! Imagine how horrified those screaming people would be now, when, for example, you can log on to the “Evidence of Evil” Web site and they’ll send you a boxful of bloody prosthetics, which you can reassemble into a crack-addicted whore, who will then emit some clues through her computerized voice box—and when you think you know who murdered her you enter the name of the killer on the Web site and, if you’re right, you’ll get to see a short clip of her making love with her killer moments before he hacks her to bits while she has a flashback of her mother beating her with a chair leg.

I mean, O.K., there was violence when I was a kid, sure, but nobody really talked about it. If you got strangled and dismembered, you just got up the next day whistling a happy tune and went down and did some riveting for the war effort. As for computer simulations, sorry, all we had was sketchpads and pencils. If we wanted to see what various female world leaders looked like naked in the throes of orgasm, we had to use a little thing called the imagination. Plus, all the world leaders were men back then, and, believe me, once you’ve drawn Richard Nixon naked and in the throes of orgasm you never have quite the same interest in using your imagination again, and every time you even see a pencil you get a little puky and have to sit down.

Whenever I talk to young people—like some of the teen-agers in my neighborhood, or this one toddler, Maxie, or even a couple of fetuses I run into occasionally—I say to them: Trust me, guys, enjoy your youth, because the level of sex and violence is going to continue to escalate, and, by the time you’re my age, the world of your youth will seem like a distant, innocent paradise. The teen-agers and the toddler, Maxie, sometimes they seem to get it, but the fetuses—well, you know fetuses, they’re arrogant. To them, it’s always going to be a soft gentle ride in a warm comfortable space. And I’m, like, O.K., smart guy, call me in nine months and we’ll talk. Or I will! You’ll just be lying there pink and newborn, with a terrified look on your face, apologizing to me with those little shocked eyes.

Things just keep getting worse. Why, I suspect that, in forty years, when I’m eighty-seven, I’ll look back at the present level of sex and violence and go: Ha! Ho-ho! You called that sex and violence? That was nothing. That was Puritanism and pacifism compared to now! But then I’ll have to go, because it will be Stripper Night at the old folks’ home, and I’ll have to find my costume and my back brace, but on the way there I’ll be killed by a mysterious old-folks’-home invader, who actually works for Fox and is committing and filming my murder for later broadcast on “When Codgers on Their Way to Strip Look Terrified.”

Same with music, though, right? I used to love music, back when it had melody and chords and lyrics. But now it has no melody and no chords, just thwack-thwacking, and they even seem to be cutting back on the thwack-thwacking, so now it’s sometimes just thwa, and, as far as lyrics, do you consider these lyrics?

Hump my hump,
My stumpy lumpy hump!
Hump my dump, you lumpy slumpy dump!
I’ll dump your hump, and then just hump your dump,
You lumpy frumply clump.

I’m sorry. To me? Those are not lyrics. In my day, lyrics were used to express real emotion, like the emotion of being totally stoned and trying to talk this totally stoned chick into sleeping with you in the name of love, which lasted forever, if only you held on to your dreams.

These kids today, I don’t know what they believe. I mean, I don’t even know what I believe anymore, but what I do not believe is that watching Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson roll around in pizza sauce is helping our youth as they go forth and try to figure out what they believe! Scientific evidence suggests that even the fetuses inside of mothers watching that commercial are getting (1) dumber and (2) little baby boners. I do not go for that. I think that when a fetus is in the womb it should just be floating around with its undersized arrogant head empty and its little nascent penis just, you know, inactive. We grow these kids up too fast, and, next thing you know, out come the Indian and the Chinese fetuses, and they start taking away the jobs of our homeland fetuses, and why? Because these foreign fetuses aren’t jaded. They’re innocent like I was, like my whole generation was, when we were fetuses, back in those long-forgotten idyllic days when American fetuses walked the earth like happy unsoiled giants, doing algebra and reading the classics.

And yet I don’t like the fact that I’ve become a prude. Life expectancies being what they are, I may be only halfway through my life, and who wants to live out half one’s life as a prude? Not me. I want to live out about one-tenth of my life as a prude, that last tenth, when I’m inert and confused and immobile anyway. So I’ve decided to start prude-proofing myself via a series of daily micro-immersions in sex and violence. Last week, for example, I sat on my couch looking at a bra for over an hour. Then I forced myself to watch a video of a duck being hit by a car. Then I tried listening to the sound of the duck on the video being hit by the car, while looking at the bra. Next, I turned up the sound, while looking at a slightly sexier bra. Then I watched the duck being hit while I ran my hand over the bra. Then I had my wife put on the bra, which was a very effective technique, because as I tried to run my hand over the bra my wife nailed me with an ashtray just as the duck was hit by the car—one of the best micro-immersions in sex and violence a guy could ask for.

And tonight is my biggest depruding test yet: I am going to, while hitting myself with a brick and begging my wife to walk by in her bra, watch an episode of “Dream Yer Final Dream!,” on which a contestant selected from a field of more than five thousand applicants will be granted his Final Dream, which, in this case, is to be beaten nearly to death with a tire iron so that Carmen Electra can come in naked and give him a lap dance in the last moments of his life.

I have high hopes. I know I can do this. If I succeed, our whole culture will once again be open to me. And who knows? I may even go see a movie.

and no, jaq, that's not my friend's interview. his will be in a much, much smaller publication. i will link it when it comes out.

for the record, i know this b/c before moving here, i read the relevent ile threads. not b/c i'm stalking anyone :)

The last story in this collection - "Commcomm" - is simply a work of genius, one of the most moving works of fiction i've ever read. the ending is very similar to "Civilwarland In Bad Decline" (the story itself not the collection) but improves on that (already amazing) last section tenfold. i had a lump in my throat as i finished the story. Cutty, if you haven't read this yet you are in for a TREAT.

*first name terms but, hey, he feels like a friend!

Slacker could've at least provided the MacArthur Foundation with a head-shot - dude is the only person that doesn't have a picture.

I wanted to tidy that quote up; jed had let a capital I slip and it bugged me when I read it through;

he is very funny, agreed; and I agree with nabisco that he not just making fun of the kind of everyday communication strung along in threaded jargon; speech as non-composed, imposed catchphrase commonplaces which have can have jolting effects:

I agree with cutty, too; and said so - without actually agreeing with cutty - the other day in conversation with jed: and it's a thing I most like about his writing: the stories appear whole and resolute, like the world itself, his worlds themselves, not piecemeal and built but entire;worlds with their own ins and throughs, outs and unders; full and so disorienting at first, as if you've found yourself on the wrong level of the office you work in and suddenly the fixtures are all wrong but the layout's somehow similar; but still they hang, suspended in the nets of their own logic, and eventually, as you come to their ends, you get understanding, whether it be through completion, correspondence, chronology, whatever - whether simple reading - eventual understanding achieved; and it can have the force and feel of a small miracle, like when how you look at somene or some phrase they have and it turns unfamiliar and queer to you then back through the angles into familiarity again and you shudder, kno'?

anyway, so he's funny, and has an ear for the way things shouldn't sound or be said, as much as people have noted he has an ear for what is said:

#1
He says: now get off your indefensible high horse and give me Sam's home phone.

So I get off my indefensible high horse and give him Sam's home phone.

#2
He's shouting for forgiveness. He's shouting that he's just a man. He's shouting that hatred and war made him nuts. I start running down the hill agreeing with him.

great posts nabisco, above, incidentally, to rain praise on you even tho you don't really need it, bub

I also think nabisco's is a valiant attempt to show "hysterical realism" as perhaps not altogether something new and not the lit. in majority - feels instinctually a touch disingenuous, if well-meaning, however, though I'm not, if I ever was!, currently up on the coin that this stuff gets in lit.america - did it ever have the pull and prominence in britain? jerry to fill in details? I can't rememeber

this is a particularly saundersian line itself from nabisco: he brings one old lady back from the dead and it's all "yeah, hysterics." : )

I agree with stevie jerard and read a lot of barthelme (the subvert technical manuals charge), beckett (fatalism fight meaning) and a whole bunch other stuff it's too late to try trace from the fanned saunders book on ma lap

anyway it's late and I'm still trying to stay away from places on the www that are bad for me : )

i never heard of him till today, i just bought civilwarland in bad decline though

who loves goerge?

new collection of non-fiction essays out today

http://www.amazon.com/Braindead-Megaphone-George-Saunders/dp/159448256X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-5875193-3965550?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188933122&sr=8-1

He's doing a reading at the Park Slope B&N on Thursday. Too bad everything I've heard about his non-fiction is keeping me far away from this collection.

also at the chelsea barnes & noble (6th @ 22nd) 7pm thursday

my sister read a galley and loved it

yah theres not any listing for the park slope store on the wesite

for a george saunders reading there on thursday that is

I'm an idiot; the map link from Flavorpill gave me the Park Slope one.

anyway i think i might go

Too bad everything I've heard about his non-fiction is keeping me far away from this collection.

i will gladly purchase this collection no matter what

I bought a signed copy of the new collection yesterday - if I'd known George was in town, I would have gone to his reading but I didn't find out until after the fact. Hearing him read part of "Jon" at Bumbershoot last year was the highlight of the weekend for me.

i stopped by the reading but it was so fucking over full - then i left

the new collection is suprisingly awesome!

(surprising because i love his fiction, but i've found a lot of his non-fiction that i've read to be boring. anyway, i dig the new book.)

I read the first page of "Braindead Megaphone" (? - whichever the first piece is) while standing on the street and now am saving the rest of the book like the last candy from Easter.

My Gal
by George Saunders September 22, 2008

Explaining how she felt when John McCain offered her the Vice-Presidential spot, my Vice-Presidential candidate, Governor Sarah Palin, said something very profound: “I answered him ‘Yes’ because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can’t blink. So I didn’t blink then even when asked to run as his running mate.”

Isn’t that so true? I know that many times, in my life, while living it, someone would come up and, because of I had good readiness, in terms of how I was wired, when they asked that—whatever they asked—I would just not blink, because, knowing that, if I did blink, or even wink, that is weakness, therefore you can’t, you just don’t. You could, but no—you aren’t.

That is just how I am.

Do you know the difference between me and a Hockey Mom who has forgot her lipstick?

A dog collar.

Do you know the difference between me and a dog collar smeared with lipstick?

Not a damn thing.

We are essentially wired identical.

So, when Barack Obama says he will put some lipstick on my pig, I am, like, Are you calling me a pig? If so, thanks! Pigs are the most non-Élite of all barnyard animals. And also, if you put lipstick on my pig, do you know what the difference will be between that pig and a pit bull? I’ll tell you: a pit bull can easily kill a pig. And, as the pig dies, guess what the Hockey Mom is doing? Going to her car, putting on more lipstick, so that, upon returning, finding that pig dead, she once again looks identical to that pit bull, which, staying on mission, the two of them step over the dead pig, looking exactly like twins, except the pit bull is scratching his lower ass with one frantic leg, whereas the Hockey Mom is carrying an extra hockey stick in case Todd breaks his again. But both are going, like, Ha ha, where’s that dumb pig now? Dead, that’s who, and also: not a smidge of lipstick.

A lose-lose for the pig.

There’s a lesson in that, I think.

Who does that pig represent, and that collar, and that Hockey Mom, and that pit bull?

You figure it out. Then give me a call.

Seriously, give me a call.

Now, let us discuss the Élites. There are two kinds of folks: Élites and Regulars. Why people love Sarah Palin is, she is a Regular. That is also why they love me. She did not go to some Élite Ivy League college, which I also did not. Her and me, actually, did not go to the very same Ivy League school. Although she is younger than me, so therefore she didn’t go there slightly earlier than I didn’t go there. But, had I been younger, we possibly could have not graduated in the exact same class. That would have been fun. Sarah Palin is hot. Hot for a politician. Or someone you just see in a store. But, happily, I did not go to college at all, having not finished high school, due to I killed a man. But had I gone to college, trust me, it would not have been some Ivy League Élite-breeding factory but, rather, a community college in danger of losing its accreditation, built right on a fault zone, riddled with asbestos, and also, the crack-addicted professors are all dyslexic.

Sarah Palin was also the mayor of a very small town. To tell the truth, this is where my qualifications begin to outstrip even hers. I have never been the mayor of anything. I can’t even spell right. I had help with the above, but now— Murray, note to Murray: do not correct what follows. Lets shoe the people how I rilly spel Mooray and punshuate so thay can c how reglar I am, and ther 4 fit to leed the nashun, do to: not sum mistir fansy pans.

OK Mooray. Get corecting agin!

Thanks, Murray, you’re fabulous. Very good at what you do. Actually, Murray, come to think of it, you are so good, I suspect you are some kind of Élite. You are fired, Murray, as soon as this article is done. I’m going to hire someone Regular, who is not so excellent, and lives off the salt of the land and the fat of his brow and the sweat of his earth. Although I hope he’s not a screw-up.

I’m finding it hard to concentrate, as my eyes are killing me, due to I have not blinked since I started writing this. And, me being Regular, it takes a long time for me to write something this long.

Where was I? Ah, yes: I hate Élites. Which is why, whenever I am having brain surgery, or eye surgery, which is sometimes necessary due to all my non-blinking, I always hire some random Regular guy, with shaking hands if possible, who is also a drunk, scared of the sight of blood, and harbors a secret dislike for me.

Now, let’s talk about slogans. Ours is: Country First. Think about it. When you think of what should come first, what does? Us ourselves? No. That would be selfish. Our personal families? Selfish. God? God is good, I love Him, but, as our slogan suggests, no, sorry, God, You are not First. No, you don’t, Lord! How about: the common good of all mankind! Is that First? Don’t make me laugh with your weak blinking! No! Mercy is not First and wisdom is not First and love is super but way near the back, and ditto with patience and discernment and compassion and all that happy crap, they are all back behind Country, in the back of my S.U.V., which— Here is an example! Say I am about to run over a nun or orphan, or an orphan who grew up to become a nun—which I admire that, that is cool, good bootstrapping there, Sister—but then God or whomever goes, “It is My will that you hit that orphaned nun, do not ask Me why, don’t you dare, and I say unto thee, if you do not hit that nun, via a skillful swerve, your Country is going to suffer, and don’t ask Me how, specifically, as I have not decided that yet!” Well, I am going to do my best to get that nun in one felt swope, because, at the Convention, at which my Vice-Presidential candidate kicked mucho butt, what did the signs there say? Did they say “Orphaned Nuns First” and then there is a picture of a sad little nun with a hobo pack?

Not in my purview.

Sarah Palin knows a little something about God’s will, knowing God quite well, from their work together on that natural-gas pipeline, and what God wills is: Country First. And not just any country! There was a slight error on our signage. Other countries, such as that one they have in France, reading our slogan, if they can even read real words, might be all, like, “Hey, bonjour, they are saying we can put our country, France, first!” Non, non, non, France! What we are saying is, you’d better put our country first, you merde-heads, or soon there will be so much lipstick on your pit bulls it will make your berets spin!

In summary: Because my candidate, unlike your winking/blinking Vice-Presidential candidate, who, though, yes, he did run as the running mate when the one asking him to run did ask him to run, which that I admire, one thing he did not do, with his bare hands or otherwise, is, did he ever kill a moose? No, but ours did. And I would. Please bring a moose to me, over by me, and down that moose will go, and, if I had a kid, I would take a picture of me showing my kid that dead moose, going, like, Uh, sweetie, no, he is not resting, he is dead, due to I shot him, and now I am going to eat him, and so are you, oh yes you are, which is responsible, as God put this moose here for us to shoot and eat and take a photo of, although I did not, at that time, know why God did, but in years to come, God’s will was revealed, which is: Hey, that is a cool photo for hunters about to vote to see, plus what an honor for that moose, to be on the Internet.

How does the moose feel about it? Who knows? Probably not great. But do you know what the difference is between a dead moose with lipstick on and a dead moose without lipstick?

Lipstick.

Think about it.

Moose are, truth be told, Élites. They are big and fast and sort of rule the forest. Sarah took that one down a notch. Who’s Élite now, Bullwinkle?

Not Sarah.

She’s just Regular as heck. ♦

Brilliance!

what an honor for that moose, to be on the Internet

he writes like you, scott.

hahaha, i was actually writing something and i stopped to read the saunders thing and my first reaction - after i stopped laughing - was: jesus, maybe i should stick to reading.

The theater company I belong to in Chicago is doing a stage adaptation of "Jon" in October, and he'll be here at least for the opening.

re-reading civilwarland (and will probably follow with a re-reading of everything else)

love this man deeply

cannot believe there have been no film adaptations of his work yet

Most of his the good stuff happens in the narration, or inside people's heads, for the most part: hard to translate to the screen.

wasnt there going to be an adaptation of civilwarland? or did i make that up

with ben stiller? i think?

or possibly i mean affleck. someone with the forename benjamin.

ben gurion

Sounds like a disaster in the making.

FILM:

Currently in development is a screenplay for CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, optioned by Ben Stiller who has commissioned Mr. Saunders to write the screenplay.

Mr. Saunders has already completed the screenplay for Joysticks which is based on the story "Sea Oak," to be directed by Keir McFarlane.

"Sea Oak" is probably my favorite story of his, but it's hard to imagine it working as a movie. Maybe animated it would.

the stiller thing has been talked about for years. probably would never happen but i could see him being cast as the vietnam war veteran--but that would be weird following tropic thunder.

I'd like to see it.

I just reread Gappers and Phil and In Persuasion Nation and I don't know how I feel about this guy anymore -- the first time i read the latter I thought it was amaaaaazing and now I'm finding his various tics like show up? a little more? -- not his dialogue, actually, but eh I don't know.

Like, the last story, forgotten the title. The one about the guy who works on some kind of Air Force base coming up with press releases downplaying snafus, and who goes around trying to deal with his annoying boss and Christian coworker with self-help slogans, and not doing very well with it; except this guy also lives with the ghosts of his parents, and that bit takes over at the end. And I started feeling it was basically kind of arbitrary? where that aspect took over? And not just at that point in that story, but almost in the collection as a whole? -- like it's organized into these subunits and everything is sort of almost linked, and it started to seem to me like the whole thing was trying to carry too much weight on too glib a structure.

But: I also kind of think I might find more to enjoy in his earlier collections, now, if I went back; that maybe the stuff that's bothering me now is more of a thing in that last collection, maybe even why I enjoyed it more than the first two in the first place.

Also now I think maybe was there a long argument earlier on in this thread about basically the issue I'm having but in relation to where the fantastic stuff took over in a different story? I haven't reread the thread yet. Might do that, now.

see, everything you mention about the last story, Comm Comm, the connectivity and stuff, is everything i love about it

i suspect my issue with that one might be different to my issue with the others. i think maybe the only reason i'm having a problem is that the sections, the way they're prefaced by the extracts from the made-up book, how there's a section of 'realist' ones and a section with the more gonzo ones, put the stories into a position where they look like they ought to have a cohesive argument - which they don't - and that also makes it seem like all the departures from realism working in the same way - which they really don't

i suspect he didn't place them in the order that he did to make a cohesive argument, though, but instead, grouped like minded stories together so they could play off one another. it is my guess that saunders doesn't want to make an argument or a point with his fiction, other than to create the stories themselves.

and by point i mean, well of course each individual story has a point and a theme, but i think you're looking for an argument in these stories that just isn't there for me at all.

no i don't think there is, either - i think the arrangement is intended to do what you're saying, but i feel like it ends up giving a contrary impression. is the thing.

i guess i am still wondering what this contrary impression is. so you think putting the like minded stories together makes them seem flimsier?

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2010/01/25/100125sh_shouts_saunders

dope interview - http://www.moreview.org/content/dynamic/view_text.php?text_id=819

(just realised it's old, new to me tho)

thx

Love his response here:

Interviewer: So much of your fiction is charged with social import. Given our recent political upheavals, have you ever thought of writing overt political satire?

Saunders: I'm not very interested in that kind of satire because it works on the assumption that They Are Assholes. Fiction works on the assumption that They Are Us, on a Different Day.

..which relates back to his notion of compassion/satire not being mutually exclusive earlier in the interview.

Great interview (I love "Escape from Spiderhead" too): http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/12/george-saunderss-wild-ride.html

If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he’s made of sugar.

"Isabelle" is as stupendous a story as I'm aware of from the last 40 years or so. Blunt and pure.

― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Friday, September 9, 2005

Unexpected! I just discovered him. I realized I'd read "The Falls" in The New Yorker some years ago. Anyway, "Isabelle" is terrific.

where have you guys been!

haha i was like shit yeah i'm ahead of alfred on something

alfred that was quick! did you buy civilwarland today or something?

New book of stories, "Tenth of December," is aces.

Well, newish, not out til January but I have a review copy.

She took my face in her hands and turned my head so I was looking in the window at Ryan, who was heating a bottle at the kitchen sink.
“Does that look like a hitter?” she said.
“No,” I said.
And it didn’t. Not at all.
“Jesus,” I said. “Does anybody tell the truth around here?”
“I do,” she said. “You do.”
I looked at her and for a minute she was eight and I was ten and we were hiding in the doghouse while Ma and Dad and Aunt Toni, on mushrooms, trashed the patio.

profile in the nyt magazine - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/magazine/george-saunders-just-wrote-the-best-book-youll-read-this-year.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

That's a great link. Thanks.

i don't know about 'the best book you'll read this year'

i mean, i'm brining war and peace to the hospital next week

salt war tol.

This is sitting on my table right now. I sort of have to wait for my gf to finish reading it first but still, stoked.

i don't know about 'the best book you'll read this year'

I've surely mentioned before the reviewer quoted on rhe blurb of Mason & Dixon, which came out, what, 2001? who said "If there's a better book this decade, I'll literally eat my hat."

Actually, for me, M&D might save this reviewer all sorts of gustatory indignities, which in no wise reduces the absurdity of the comment.

looking forward to reading this anyway.

I think it's actually "if America produces a novel better than this all decade, I promise to eat it" - I think Mason & Dixon came out in 1998 so that was a pretty safe bet at that point in the decade, but then again it was Philip Hensher and anything that makes him uncomfortable is okay by me.

It is that, thanks. Never let every single crucial detail about an anecdote being wrong put you off trying to tell it.

Matt DC, what have you got against Philip Hensher particularly? (i ask from a totally agnostic p.o.v. - never read a word of his fiction, enjoyed the odd review of his in the spectator, remember reading an unsolicited letter in private eye which testified to at least one moment of decency)

oh and looking forward to the new saunders, even tho i think it's all been downhill since Civilwarland...

Ward Fowler - I was just being facetious really, I find Hensher's writing style irritating and I didn't enjoy The Northern Clemency, but that's about the extent of it. I'm willing to believe he's a good guy really who's on the right side of many important issues.

I enjoy his reviews in the spectator and i think he's smart and funny, if a little conceited, but i can't get myself interested in reading any of his novels

Is anyone else weirded out that Saunders is inadvertently responsible for the Geico caveman? (and by extension the short-lived Geico caveman sitcom)

seems entirely appropriate to me.

based on the nytimes piece I am extremely anticipating reading this dude's work. slogging through the last quarter of the book I'm on now, _John Dies at the End_...

I'd recommend starting at the start

what's up with that civilwarland reissue, does that exist yet

I want: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/books/review/tenth-of-december-by-george-saunders.html?ref=books

started civilwarland...title story is fantastic, as is the 400 lb CEO. The rest, so far, are a bit too much like Brautigan or Pynchon to be enjoyable to my taste. Then again I was pretty drunk when reading, so maybe I should go back.

guess i'd read all? of 10th of dec previously in the nyer but they were valuable to re-read imo

am currently watching him on charlie rose

I totally lost my shit at the title story in Tenth of December.

enjoyed pastoralia a lot but could not make it through several stories from persuasion nation

which ones?

http://www.theawl.com/2013/02/real-as-hell-a-conversation-with-george-saunders

^ great

I just finished Pastoralia, which is my second Saunders book. I think "Sea Oak" is one of the best short stories I have ever read. I have been wanting to talk about it with somebody, but my wife, a Joycian who doesn't read anything written after 1945, refuses to read postmodern fiction of any kind, at least until she finishes her dissertation (which is fair). So happy to have this thread, then, and nabisco's great posts, which are some of my favorite posts I've read on ILX. It was great to read such an articulate analysis of Saunders' use of language, and why it's so effective:

there's a rich uncle who spouts optimistic banalities about hard work in such a way that you feel he believes it, you understand him -- and even better, when the aunt's grave is desecrated, Saunders pegs the entire role of the policeman simply by putting question marks at the end of his sentences. (I wish I had the book here to quote: I think he says "Typically we find it's teens?" and in that question mark you hear everything -- the desire to be helpful and reassuring, and the complete powerlessness to actually be helpful and reassuring.)

The FIRPO story really got to me, too. It was like a Carver story narrated by the doomed child instead of the unhappy parents of the doomed child. "Winky" and the one about the barber were just ok, but I really loved the rest.

Anyway, I've read CivilWarLand In Bad Decline (though it's been years and I think I want to read it again; someone gave it to me as a gift a long time ago in an attempt to get me to quit reading Sedaris), and now, Pastoralia. Which one next?

Diminishing returns? I'm half way into The Tenth of December and finding it not good and his concerns and ticks too repetitive. I mean, I know it's apt to have a character think an absurd or mundane thought then think "ha ha" and wrote that but he's used it in every story bar one so far. And the ending of "escape from the spiderhead" is the exact ending he's used in two stories in previous collections. People have spoken highly of" the semplica girl diaries" but I couldn't really believe the idea of the SGs in the first place and then the story tails off in a not very interesting way rather than actually ending. There are a few like that too. The only story I thought was good thus far was the two page one called "Sticks".

I enjoyed the narrative language of the SG diaries but couldn't actually work out what it had to do with the character of the narrator and spent the first half of the story thinking of the zen koans on t-shirts thread on I'll and thought the narrator was meant to me writing in a second language. Didn't really make any sense to me, anyway.

On ilx not I'll

escape from spiderhead is pretty bad -- takes a bunch of themes he's done before, makes the real-life parallels obvious, puts in a christian sacrifice at the ending. i liked most of the others.

i don't even remember spiderhead. is it the one with the old dude trying to kill himself? i liked that one. i didn't like most of the others.

i think i liked it best of his books, the writing is very virtuoso

that's the worst thing about it

that doesnt make any sense

spiderhead = testing emotion drugs on people

i. i think saunders is worse now that the purpose of each sentence is not to communicate the interiority of the american lower-middle and working classes and instead to communicate how good george saunders is at communicating the interiority of etc.
ii. there's been a real flattening of idea and of sentiment that's gone along with this

though i think 'tenth' is probably less bad than the one that came out when i was an undergraduate, which i overrated at the time, because of how i was an undergraduate

the semplica girl diaries is--to use a phrase which seems to be becoming so much popular on ilx that we could probably abbreviate it--a little too on the nose

i think saunders is worse now that the purpose of each sentence is not to communicate the interiority of the american lower-middle and working classes and instead to communicate how good george saunders is at communicating the interiority of etc.

this is the sentence that killed david foster wallace

(not a disagreement. i haven't read saunders recently.)

fair

I don't really like his sci-fi stories. The final story in Tenth is completely devastating though. Otherwise the ones that have stuck with me are the first story with the child abduction, and the one with the puppy and the kid tied to the tree.

i. i think saunders is worse now that the purpose of each sentence is not to communicate the interiority of the american lower-middle and working classes and instead to communicate how good george saunders is at communicating the interiority of etc.

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Sunday, October 11, 2015 3:59 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk he always seemed a lil too literal and proud of himself to really communicate any sort of deep ~interiority~ or w/e he is often an astonishingly good writer tho and funny

I read him for the yuks tbh -- that affected affectlessness.

fairly tepid review of the novel

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/the-sentimental-sadist/513824/

I'm guessing that's a deliberate hit job, but it doesn't really encourage me to pick up the novel, either.

There was a point when Persistent Gappers of Frip came out, and I started to think, "You know, maybe this guy isn't very good anymore" and the voice kind of curdled on me. I haven't read Tenth of December, but is it fair to say everything since Pastoralia is just more of the same? Even at the time (although it's very good) Pastoralia felt like a retread. At this point it seems like his interviews are more enjoyable than his writing.

pretty much

tenth of december is great imho, and i went in thinking i was kinda sick of him, similar themes to his earlier work but the prose is more dynamic or something

A bit more than "similar" IMO. I thought it was rotten. I liked that one page story called "pole" though.

Have enjoyed most of his work, but 400p is not the length at which i want to read it.

Most of Tenth of December seemed overwrought and and/or too crafty, also maybe not crafty enough, re pattern recognition---if a hyper and otherwise goofy boychild and an old man with dementia are wandering the same landscape, of course they're eventually going to come into proximity and have A Saunders Moment, very painterly. But did like for instance when the way the Unstable War Vet, the kind that used to be standard on TV etc. before vets pretty much vanished from TV etc, gets re-absorbed into the family dynamic, for a while--and of course might actually freak out etc. later, with family members getting some measure of blame, suspicion etc; Saunders does always seek some kind of verisimilitude, and there he gets it. But overall, I think Karen Russell's Vampires In The Leomon Grove is much better at social commentary x imaginative writing, with no overselling.

D'oh! The Lemon Grove, of course. I'll prob read some more Saunders----Civilwarland In Bad Decline was pretty good, I take it?

I read CivilWarLand when the paperback came out in the mid-90s, when it was a good bridge between the sci-fi I read as a teenager and the Proper Literature I pretended to like in my twenties. Anyway, it's amazing (or so I remember) but the shtick probably doesn't come across as original as it seemed at the time, if only because it's been imitated so often (especially by Saunders).

That Lemon Grove thing seemed fun in the excerpt on Amazon.

I've only read 10th of December but found it fantastic, especially The Semplica-Girl Diaries which can be read online http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/15/the-semplica-girl-diaries

should probably read his older stuff

The NYorker has a ton of Saunders stuff avail to read

Lincoln in the Bardo was an inspiring read. Can't think of another contemporary American author with such an impressive grasp of language and style. It's both straightforward and experimental, postmodern and touching, even spiritual. I'm going to check out his early work when I get the chance.

Oh yeah, and of course it's very funny too.

The cacophony of voices and styles is elegantly integrated with the themes and narrative, really just a very clever way of telling the story, surprisingly easy to follow.

I've heard so-so things about it but you've just convinced me to give it a shot

Great! I'm not sure I'd want to argue that it's perfect in every way, but I def think it's an enjoyable read all the way - and even though it's labeled as a novel, it's really more written in the style of a drama which means you read it in no time

this story is very lovely!

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/21/george-saunders-fox-8-short-story-man-booker-prize-lincoln-bardo

oh yeah, and he won the Booker Prize.

did anyone other than niels on here read lincoln in the bardo? i picked it up the other day and there is no way in hell i could read that book. that looked like the kind of book that people buy and then never finish but maybe i'm just dumb.

Same. I’ve read his other stuff but could only make it through the beginning

i read it and loved it, but i could totally see picking it up and not finishing it.

i like his style a lot but, like carver, he's spawned a lot of imitators, and his style has some limits.

his turns toward the sentimental can be heartbreaking and also veer toward sap

I liked it a lot, but it took a minute to get going iirc.

you aren't alone, scott. I got about halfway through it and realized I had no desire to continue down that path. It felt like a song stuck on repeat.

it does take a minute to get going, and to figure out that most of the characters are talking to themselves and not really responding to other characters. it's a series of overlapping narratives, which makes sense from a writer of short stories.

I mean, it is about purgatory.

xp

I listened to the full cast audiobook. I think that's the way to get it done. Although, I will say that our book club (we are all Saunders fans) liked it in any format.

xp - Not quite purgatory. That's where one expiates one's sins in order to become purified and ascend to heaven, but the bardo, where regrets and desires keep one tethered to a past life, unable to move on to the next. So the bardo is a fruitless stasis. That makes for a tough challenge in terms of narrative and Saunders means of handling that challenge bogged down too much to repay me for the effort of finishing it.

His mix of gleeful cruelty and sappy sentimentality sets my teeth on edge. Liked the first couple of collections but it's been diminishing returns since then.

i finished L in the B, it did seem like a short story idea stretched out to novel length. Some of it was quite moving, some of it struck me as emotionally manipulative, either way it didn't make me want to read anything more by him.

i had never read any Saunders until Lincoln in the Bardo & i really loved it, i found it very moving.