Momus Momus Momus

Are you the Ann Sterzinger interviewed in three parts by The Whirligig here? The Ann who writes for the Reader? The Ann who was 'kicked out of a writing program in Wisconsin, despite her talent, because she had strong opinions and didn't play the game'?

Welcome to ILX. Your talent, occasional public nudity and strong opinions will be no more welcome here. There will be a thread, one day, entitled 'Sterzinger Sterzinger Sterzinger' in which someone posts a picture of 'Mein Kampf' as the final word on two years of what you thought were provocative and interesting contributions. Turn, leave, go now!

most seem to be pudgy journo types, or with a skinny-ass strung-out look.

When should our ideal Momus expose himself? Does his back catalog color our expectations of his behaviour to such a Victorian extent that he dare not lapse and veer from our collectively unspoken prescribed paradigm of green tea-sipping, hyper-literate, Orientalist, reactionary, indie-web poet-laureate?

Stability of mood is for the Xanax'ed and Zoloft'ed amongst us. I say, regardless of my or anyone's agreeability with your actions Mr. Currie, continue against the path of predestination.

Fireworks are fun to watch. Appropo on an Independence Day. I'd say...

Love, ol' Maria B.

and no fucking fiddle player.

and a more intimate relationship with Cynthia Plaster Caster.

Hee. Well, thanks to Momus for the warning, but I doubt anyone could come up with a German joke noxious or embarrassing enough to compete with the fact that I once touched brains with Michael Jackman. But I am that Sterzinger, roughly, though the Village Voice did let slip a few fact-checking errors (in New York, imagine that). For one, the closest I've lived to Wicker Park was Avondale (not that I've worked as a porcelain sanitation engineer at all since moving to Chicago, but any dishwasher who wanted to move to Wicker Park would have to live under the el bridge). But all misunderrememberings in the Whirligig interview are mine. Incidentally I wore the lace dress for a sentimental reason (not that its transparency bothered me, duh): a friend, Lisa Falour, had worn it at CBGB's 20 years earlier. I also had on a very nice sport coat.

Anyway, really, can somebody please drop the all-important topic of whether the author is an OK Joe for long enough to tell me how I can get my filthy little dish-soap-and-semen-covered hands on a physical copy of the (*&$#($ book!??!?!? I do write for the Reader (you can only pretend you're Roddy Piper for so long before body parts start to fall off) and I'm trolling for interesting stuff for our third special Books issue this fall.

Only rock writer I remember 'slumming' was Kendrick; and while her piece *was* rock-related (Tolkien-in-Metal Shocka), it demonstrated an insane knowledge of JRR and beyond, was a fun read, and had a thesis neatly parallel to Sterzinger's.

Hey, Nabisco, I haven't even gotten to read the damn book yet! WHERE CAN I FIIIIIIIND AAAAA COP-EEEEEEEEEE?!?!?! I have no idea what the story would be, or whether it would become just a small part of an essay... or, hell, I might just enjoy reading it and not find any immediate use for the information. All work, no play...

But about rock-lit miscegenation: the ULA is annoying to me because it's humorless and dogmatic, not because it er... maketh one art form to lieth with another. I like mixed stir-fry and I enjoy Pulp with my Saki, can't help it.

More seriously, the Reader's only put out 2 Books issues so far, and we just managed to win a weekly critics choice for the Readings and Lectures section of the listings; we're in the process of sneaking a new minidepartment into a fairly old paper, in short; we'll get there.

That aside, literature is a dangerous thing to write about "importantly" (complaining of the Reader's literary dilettantism while not knowing your Kingsley Amis, shame, shame!!!). Writers, most notably bad ones (ULA included) tend to take their ahhhhhht form (read: themselves, aka the great writers they picture when they think the word "me") more seriously than they take the actual work of writing, much to literature's detriment; god forbid we dole out any more great sweeping rhetorical encouragement. (Not that rockeros these days aren't getting to be just as bad.) And most readers aren't writers or experts -- they want to know what books might be worth chunks of their limited time and money, not get theses and R-town cheerleading shoved down their throats.

That litfic essay was yours, Ann? I remember enjoying the hell out of that thing, which is saying something considering how many litfic-is-a-toilet pieces get fussed over every year. It's nice to hear the Reader will be upping the books quotient beyond the odd locals (the bit on dude-who-wrote-Lummox was the point where I figured the Reader was interested in writers but not what they write) -- ever since M.B. got there I've been hoping there'd be more bookstuff going on. Unfortunately I won't be in town to see it take off. Godspeed and all.

And by the way, yeah, most readers aren't writers or experts, which I take to indicate exactly the opposite of what you do: oddities and pulp and obscurities (e.g., umm Momus) aren't beloved by the average reader as an alternative to the academic litfic establishment, they're beloved by the academic litfic establishment, by "writers and experts," by people who've spent too long absorbing high-modernist Art-talk in lit programs. It strikes me that the people who tire of litfic and hold up genre novels as their unpretentious antidote rarely if ever hold up the genre novels that the bulk of people actually read -- which doesn't make it a bad effort, I don't think, but certainly messes with the essay rhetoric.

(Multiple posts here are due to the fact that I feel like I'm coming off way more conservative about this than I think I am, and while I probably am sort of conservative about literature a lot of the time, that's not really my issue: basically I just worry that a lot of people's concerted efforts to "invigorate" literature with a broader range of opinions actually backfire terribly, leading either to worse writing or the further diminishing of literature as an interesting topic that people might care to pay attention to or follow the same way they follow music or film. I can't imagine I'm the only one with that desire, because if it weren't for that desire I don't think people would hate Eggers so much: the whole disappointment with him has been that he has sort of introduced young people to the idea of literature as something you might care about, and yet has so often been really disappointing in what he's offered them. Though again, as a person who used to like Doug Coupland, I probably shouldn't talk.)

See, the bad writers would be bad writers even if they took the "work of writing" more seriously. They might be less bad writers, but who cares/no charity.

I wish more great writers nowadays would forward their selves as art. Maybe they're trying, but not enough. Most are as tedious as eating.

Well yeah--Eggers v. Carver? I'll take Eggers, because he's at least somewhat more interesting, which generally goes for minimalism vs. maximalism in fiction. (If you're really really good, you can work either. If you're only so good, max is where you oughta be). And the waning of the one before the rise of the other is basically, I think, a good thing. But the young maximalists' promise, by and large, has already decayed into nothing more than the Age of the Memoir-Novel, which even at its best is perhaps less 'art' than bad domestic minimalism at its worst.

That Eggers is also a smug self-involved careerist who thinks he's much smarter than he is and can write in exactly two voices--one of which is his own and the other of which is reserved for dogs, his brother, and frisbie--of course doesn't help. And that monstrous foreward to the Staggering thing alone has earned him a special place in the ninth circle of editorial hell, where he'll be forced to write litcrit analyses of late-night theater, edited by a monosyllabic modern-dance reviewer ...

the entirety of the review i attempted to submit to amazon: "L0L a stapler is here!!!!1

And maybe I'm alone, but the stapler just failed to transport me. The last nail in the coffin.

(Really, you're right. The finest display of his considerable talents therein. And hence utterly maddening; yeah man, you can totally jerk off with the best ...)

PS I use itals a lot. How here?

In *relatively* brief fashion it made clear that he wasn't worth reading.

Heh. You're onto something there.

And see, now we are talking about Eggers. It's like Harry Potter or Radiohead or something. Even if people just talked about Donald Antrim instead. . . .

Hm, I don't think it's charitable really to say: Lots of bad writers are talents ruined -- by laziness, by self-importance, by never getting slapped down by a good editor or self-critical faculty. The sad thing about Eggers is that he had plenty of potential. Unfortunately it seems nobody ever had the authority to tell him, "you need to rewrite that, Mr. Babble-on." Too bad he didn't figure it out for himself.

Hmmmm ... like this?

at least the intro was somewhat unique. i mean i'm no eggars fan, tho i do have a number of difft issues of mcsweeneys for some of the authors i like he prints within.

(xpost -- yeah. what nabisco said.)

Sometimes a toilet is just a toilet ...

PS Do love Duchamp, though.
PPS Sorry to have Egged anyone on; it is kind of an, er, stale debate.

Eggers' writing reminds me of someone who's actually been critiqued to death and then had the simple sense to find a personal and irritatingly self-indulgent flow that manages (or managed, tense of verb dependent on the sensitivity of your eye to the zeitgeist.... cringe!) to meta-critique the cliched grad school post-structuralist reductionism cha cha ad infinitum "anything can be fucking taken apart, boiled to death, and snorted with toss-off condescension" schpiel.... via both form and function. Of course, I say this in such an embarrassingly long-winded way in homage to Davey, and as someone who went through Brown's grad writing program and lived to talk about it. :)

Against what? The art of advertising? Hm... that reminds me of some notes I was making for a yet-unborn essay... I was listening to AM 670 (the Score, in Chicago, sports talk radio -- now whine 'ihatesports' all you like but if you want comic genius check out Dan Bernstein and Terry Boers, weekdays 10-2) half-asleep one day and a commercial came on combining two products' ads into one. Before my knee-jerk anticonsumerist gland could release its hormones I caught myself thinking "now that's a cheap way to get on the air, you split the cost of the ad... wow, the copywriters really did a good job of meshing the threads too..." before aforementioned gland announced that I was being BRAINWASHED BY THE MAN into appreciating a piece of advertising as, at least, craftsmanship. I started to get all fussy but then a memory floated up: a few years ago I was out in bumfuck, France, with a middle-aged brother and sister who, while priding themselves on being very intellectual and atheistic frogs, love to look at ancient backroads churches. Achieving one spooky, nooky green terrace to admire a little nave, the woman turned to me and said, "For all the rotten things the Catholic church did in the past, it basically gave us Western civilization... without it we would never have had all this art." And I accepted that. Why did that sound like a fair enough argument, while the thought of Ultracarb commercials being played in a museum 400 years from now makes my stomach turn? And didn't somebody say something above about Momus and a pringle jingle? And hasn't that been Peter Bagge's stuff showing up on the Altoids billboards? Come to think of it, maybe we're moving forward. Did the court/church-patronised artists get to take the money and run do their own stuff elsewhere? Or is Bagge's being allowed to pay his bills with breath mints and then keep squirreling fer joy on his own time a definite improvement?

To answer the more important part of your question: I absolutely see this as
a cultural shift, or at least a cultural shift I'd like to see, and
naturally I see it as a good thing. Nearly every writer I know, and particularly
young ones, are frustrated with the way they're treated by their publishers. They
don't feel like they have control over their destiny. Not their artistic
destiny, but their business destiny. Because like it or not, this thing we call
literature IS a business. What I want to see happen is an alternative
business model for literature akin to the indie rock explosion of the 80s and early
90s. I want to see a reading circuit outside of the Borders/Barnes and
Noble/occasional indie bookstore axis. I want writers to have other options for
coming up rather than begging for agents and editors and then if they get those
agents and editors, begging for shelf space and a marketing budget. To me,
the mixing of literature and indie rock is an opportunity for writers to claim
their own destiny, not artistically, but financially. Not all the work in
this "scene," if it does exist or if it will exist, is going to be good. Some of
it will be rock-star shallow and some of it will suck and be derivative. But
indie rock accomodates all kinds of bands. Why can't this shift in
literature, or at least the shift I dream about, accomodate all kinds of writers with
all different purposes and levels of integrity? Why should literature be
something discussed in elite forums by a select few? Why can't writers adopt the
DIY aesthetic? And who better to learn about that aesthetic from than bands?

If you want a rock analogy, here's one: I fear that the program Pollack's outlined and the program Eggers has followed cough up the lit-to-rock equivalents of Wilco or the Flaming Lips -- artists who expand the fan base for the type of art they make, but whose actual art can tend toward the slight and the glib, and whose success essentially creates for them a space within the orthodoxy they were originally slated to break down. That last is a good thing, since it means gradually replacing the orthodoxy with something more to their liking, not overthrowing it. But it also means the time for agitation will, and the time of responsibility will come. That's the part I worry about. Say Pollack's outside-the-establishment circuits come to pass: is the writing really going to get better? If his model really is "the indie rock explosion of the late 80s and early 90s," he's already planning for it to get worse!

Does THAT answer the question better, Kenan?

And in retrospect, maybe Houellebecq, Hornby et al weren't the best selections to make the festival seem cool. But it WAS cool. I guarantee all of you would have had fun.

Meanwhile, Nabisco has checked in. I meant the EARLY 80s to the early 90s, which encompasses a lot of different kinds of music. As for the rest of his post, well, if I have to be compared with Wilco or The Flaming Lips, I'd take that in a hot second. Ain't gonna happen, but I wouldn't complain. The model I propose would accomodate all comers, from the revolutionary and political to the slight and the whimsical. And I think a broader forum will only encourage better, more honest writing, not worse, if only because more writers will be getting wider and different exposure.

You may now feel free to eviscerate me collegially.

NP

Neal sounds scarily like me talking about 80s music!!

"To me, the mixing of literature and indie rock is an opportunity for writers to claim their own destiny, not artistically, but financially."

Shit, give me ANY way to claim my own financial destiny and I'll jump over Shakespeare's bloody corpse... this three-jobs-no-sleep shit is breaking my big brass balls. Jumping over bloody corpses to a smashing sound track would be even better. Then again... SLEEP DEPRIVATION IS MAKING ME EVIL!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Pardon my metaphors again.)

He doesn't seem to be producing much "on his own time" is the problem with that formula. He's churning out nothing but schlock ("Sweatshop" for DC is lame and tired, as was his girl-band collab with that Hernandez brother). I wouldn't hold it against him if he was funnelling his ad/crap-funds into something worthwhile, but I don't see any evidence of that AT ALL. Guy's old and out of ideas, sadly.

hmmm... I'm less interested in whether it leaves your soul clean 'n' pure than in whether it's good for art/evolution...

Yes--the cheetalot!

And I was reading you from yet a third perspective -- I'm not interested in the business model. I mean... that's not what I mean. I understand the importance of the business side of it, yes, but I'm not a musician or a writer with performing pretensions. I'm at the audience end of the thing.

do you have any worry that in the process of doing all the things you've just mentioned, there's the potential to turn literature into a lifestyle adjunct for other concerns, to turn not just the reading but the writing into stand-up comedy, to turn writers into characters and not the creators thereof?

I wonder that, too, and I don't think that issue has been addressed, at least not the way it was originally worded. I worry that writing that was meant to be read will come off much differently, and much worse, than just plain ol' writing. Again with the poetry slam comparison, which seems fair, even though Neal's shows aren't lame or annoying. Or when they are, it's in the name of shitting on pretention, not fostering it. If you see what I mean.

And I worry about the music, too. I'm not sure rock plays very well as part of a variety show. And I'm not sure bands that are in and of themselves variety shows have much use. But maybe that's just a matter of taste.

OK... but if Matt O'Neill and Momus must needs pen works of exceptional qual-eye-tay to cover their shill-jobber pollution, what does a trust-fund artist have to write to make up for all the syringes and fast-food wrappers he puts into landfill? (Uh, or the lake?)

http://www.nealpollack.com/mp3/memories_of_time_square.mp3

Squeaky-clean, mid-tempo, and very very off-key. :)

But if there was actually nothing new about the indie-rock publishing model or whatever Eggers or whoever were promoting/taking credit for--if there've actually been many such creatures for years and years--the only novel aspect was the perfectly played media blitz, whose savviness seemed mostly derived from, that's right, connections to and experience in the big bad old mainstream publishing establishment ... which seems maybe counterrevolutionary?

A la "outsider" (ha) Tarantino being carefully selected by Hollywood to "shake up" Hollywood?

I'm not necessarily saying one way or the other ... I'm just saying.

Wait, that's Liz Phair. Sorry.

intr. A factitious word introduced by the author of Through the Looking-Glass, and jocularly used by others after him, app. with some suggestion of chuckle, and of snort. Also trans., to utter or sing with a ‘chortling’ intonation. Also n., an act of ‘chortling’.

1872 L. CARROLL Through Looking-Glass i, ‘O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ He chortled in his joy. 1876 BESANT & RICE Gold. Butterfly xxxii. 242 It makes the cynic and the worldly-minded man to chuckle and chortle with an open joy. 1886 Referee 18 Aug. (Ware), Mr. Wilford Morgan has been engaged to chortle the famous song, ‘Here's to the maiden of bashful fifteen’. 1887 Athenæum 3 Dec. 751/1 A means of exciting cynical ‘chortling’. 1888 Daily News 10 Jan. 5/2 So may chortle the Anthropophagi. 1889 Referee 29 Dec., Many present on Boxing Night fully expected that when he appeared he would chortle a chansonette or two. 1903 ‘A. MCNEILL’ Egreg. Eng. 28 He would tell you..that he attributed his success..(5) to marrying Mrs. Business-Manthis last, of course, with a chortle.

Heh. Sorry. If it makes you feel any better I was asking because the computer the Reader deems sufficient for my needs crashes every time I try to look at the OED. I think I mentioned his name (Bartleby) above.

I should have said this earlier (but it might have stifled an unusually interesting thread) but there is no Momus novel. I've been talking to a French publisher (Serpente a Plumes) for a few months about doing a book for them which would nudge fiction -- a kind of dreamed Vasari or Calvino biography of various imaginary musicians -- but we have yet to set a publication date. The book will be written in English then translated into french.

Nabisco may now want to write to this publisher telling them it's not the kind of thing they should be doing.

(Disappears back into Osaka.)

You're kidding?

1. The combination of literature and indie rock: bloated 30somethings standing motionless beer n cigs in hand, cagily peering around a roomful of painfully similar people cagily checking them out having traded Black Flag and Throbbing Gristle for They Might be Giants, the New Pornographers and Archer Prewitt side projects that seem to always already be drifting out of the Pottery Barn sound system. Still hoping to get excited about reflexivity. The music is almost as intense as the writing.

2. Momus has an essay coming out in the new Bridge.

Momus music recommendations, 2 mixtapes online:

http://mapage.noos.fr/castellane/diginikki.html
Digiki Polypunk mix

http://www.wfmu.org/listen.ram?show=15425
DJ Elephant Power "The Impact of the Elephant on its Environment"

And Momus clothes recommendation, Moroccan robes, say no more.

Seeing as this seems to be the thread for Momus spam: A review of A Book Of Jokes.

what happened in the recently momus poll? i never saw the results.

just played on #forgotten80s