Remembering David Foster Wallace

DAVID Foster Wallace's life was brilliant, tormented, and short -- cut off by a 2008 suicide. Because your humble blogger was going through complicated matters of his own -- an incompetent gnome had just crashed the newspaper I wrote for, hundreds of colleagues and I were soon out of work -- I never entirely engaged with the sudden death of the man who is likely to stand as the greatest writer of our generation.

D.T. Max's Wallace biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, gets into the novelist's life and death, as well as the ideas that animated him and his times. The tale comes across as a classic generational journey between theory and irony on one hand and sincerity and... something else on the other.

HERE is my long Q+A with Max, on Salon.

Let me put in a plug, by the way, for a lively, recent anthology of work about DFW, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, which includes pieces by novelists Don De Lillo, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, etc., as well as DFW's editor at Little, Brown.

I also asked Max a question we did not have room for on the Salon interview. Here it is:

ST: What kind of long-term impact do we expect Wallace will have? My guess is that he opened the door to a certain kind of literary voice: Would we have gotten Dave Eggers and the McSweeney's empire without him? Anything else, generationally, culturally, or otherwise? Where do we see his influence?


DTM: Wallace definitely broadened the idea of what the "literary" could be in American fiction both in terms of the sentence and the novel itself. How many young writers today pattern themselves after him? But I think literary styles change and what is of the moment today is going to be passe tomorrow. in some ways we are already seeing a backlash. Where DFW continues to grow stornger is in what you might call almost-literary writing, on the web, on blogs, in journals, where he liberated a generation to write more the way they thought.

Is Gen X an Afterthought?

THE new issue of MOJO magazine has a cover story on the 25th anniversary of the Smiths' The Queen is Dead LP, an article on the 20th of Primal Scream's influential Screamadelica record, and another on a reunion tour by Mick Jones' Big Audio Dynamite.

It's a great issue, of course, of our favorite music magazine. But it also feels like the Gen X teenage years have now been fully commodified and sold back to us.

Perhaps the most rabid and persuasive generational warrior I know is SoCal-reared journalist Jeff Gordiner, who I've interviewed on subjects ranging from contemporary poetry to the Pavement reunion to the novels of Bret Eason Ellis.

Gordinier's book X Saves the World is well worth a look: HERE is my interview with Gordinier, who has recently stormed the New York Times Dining section with a batch of witty, intelligent stories including a memorable piece on veggie burgers.

Here's how my story begins:

These days, with a recession on the way, housing prices tanking, the Dow out of control and an unpopular war that won't seem to end, a lot of Americans are feeling uneasy and confused. Recent surveys show a majority think the nation is on what pollsters call "the wrong track."

For Jeff Gordinier, the author of the new book "X Saves the World" and an editor at large for Details magazine, it's actually kind of reassuring. "I find a strange degree of comfort in it," the writer said serenely at Pasadena's Pie 'n' Burger, a legendary diner near his hometown of San Marino. His Generation X origins, he said, make it hard for him to trust the good times.

And here is Jeff on his book:

The Wide World of David Mitchell

If there's a more inventive, most linguistically alive mid-career writer than David Mitchell, I've not read him. Best known as the author of the century-jumping, continent-hopping cult novel Cloud Atlas, he'll be appearing at Skylight Books on July 23 to read from his new novel, set mostly in the late 18th c., The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.


I was able to speak to the English-born, Japan-obsessed, Ireland-dwelling novelist for my first LA Weekly piece. Struggling artists take heart: During the early '90s recession, Mitchell was not able to land a fast food job.  "I got known as the guy who couldn't make the grade at McDonald's," Mitchell told me. "If you had that to deal with, maybe you'd go off to Japan, too."


Mitchell talked to me about Japan, the best and worst qualities of Philip K. Dick, the meaning of the word "literary," his love of the Talking Heads, and other subjects.


I reached the author as he was getting ready for a "tidy towns competition" in his rural stretch of the Cork coastline, which he described as being about "well-cut flower beds and cleanly cut grass." I got the sense of someone who was modest and deeply internal, who lives mostly in his head and puts the rest of his energy into his family. The stutter he had as a kid drove him inward.


Here he is on genre fiction: "Genre is a possibly underused but perfectly valid range of tints and shades and textures in the narrative paintbox. Use them as you wish. It's good because they bring along their own baggage, their own sense of expectation, their own cliches. You need to tweak them a bit. Inside every old chestnut of cliche you find a kernel of originality there."

On Philip K. Dick: "Fantastic ideas man, but his prose... you really have to wade through it. But what a mind -- there are only one or two of him a century. To come up with the idea for The Man in the High Castle," in which the Germans and Japanese win World War II and carve up the U.S., "is good enough. Then you've got a science-fiction writer writing a book in which the Allies win the war -- that's the Philip Dick touch. It makes me green with envy."


And on taste in music as a kid, some of which is chronicled in the bittersweet coming-of-age novel Black Swan Green: "Narrative pop music, really, which was really uncool. Rush. And I was into Yes. I'll argue that the cool-uncool thing is a circular spectrum that doubles back on itself." 


As for Rush: "They play with such aplomb, with such indifference to rockstar cliche... If you are referring to Coleridge in a pop song and singing in a high falsetto -- I don't think that's uncool."


More in this week's LA Weekly.

Jonathan Lethem to the Southland

Novelist Jonathan Lethem, though firmly associated with New York bohemia and a kind of Brooklyn renaissance, will be coming to Pomona College to take over David Foster Wallace's old job.

The author of the Brooklyn-childhood novel The Fortress of Solitude and, more recently, the Upper East Side-set Chronic City is well known to readers of The Misread City: He's among the site's core writers, along with Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, Michael Chabon and Ross Macdonald. Of this esteemed group, he is the only one not lucky enough to have spent the majority his career on the West Coast. But that begins to change this fall, when Lethem arrives at the liberal arts school based in Claremont, where he begins teaching in January. Here is Pomona's release on the position.

I've gotten to know Lethem slightly in our discussions about various authors, including his college classmate Bret Easton Ellis and his literary hero Philip K. Dick, whose Library of America volumes he has edited. Lethem is among the sharpest, intellectually rigorous and most culturally omnivorous people I know, and he's made an important push in the war to rehabilitate genre fiction. He's also a zealous Dylan fan.

Of course, despite representing a kind of post-Auster, vaguely indie-rockish spirit of Brooklyn writing, Lethem spent the first decade of his writing career in California. He lived in Berkeley from '85 to '96, working at Moe's Books and Pegasus bookstore and helping pioneer rock critic Paul Williams run the Philip K. Dick Society. Raymond Chandler and Macdonald are powerful influences on his early novels especially, and in '07 he set a slender comic novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, in Silver Lake, where he lived while putting it together.

So in some ways he's long been a California writer by osmosis.

The Misread City will speak to Lethem in the next few weeks about his imminent arrival and his thoughts about West Coast culture. Until then, all we can say is, Welcome, homes!

Portrait by Julie Jo Fehrle from Jonathan Lethem: Writer

Magical Prose and Rethinking Literary Realism

On Saturday I led a panel at UCLA with three writers who work in what we might call slipstream, literary fantasy, conceptual fiction, surrealism, or some other school still to be named. While the specific label isn't particularly important, the emphasis on rethinking realism, on embracing the best of genres like fantasy and science fiction, and moving into what Michael Chabon has called "the borderlands" between literary categories is at the center of much the best fiction these days, I think.

HERE is a Jacket Copy blogger's coverage of my panel, which I described as about the Gen-X rebellion against doctrinaire realism, and which included the writers Aimee Bender (The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake), Lev Grossman (The Magicians) and Victor LaValle (Big Machine).

My favorite moment was when LaValle was asked if he'd drawn from any myths or legends in developing his literary style and he mentioned how he had read the Bible all the way through -- a volume, he said, drawn from so many previous ancient sources that if functions like an anthology.

The Jacket Copy post includes a pretty sharp summary of the stakes of the conversation as well as a reasonable unflattering photo of yours truly mid-syllable.

I quoted Chabon's excellent book of criticism, Maps and Legends, praised the work of Ursula Le Guin, and referred to Ted Gioia's blog, Conceptual Fiction, which is dedicated to these very issues. I also name-dropped my first "favorite writer," J.R.R. Tolkien, whose family monogram is pictured.

Can 21st Century Poetry Matter?

OKAY, okay, I'll admit it's a bit corny to post on verse during National Poetry Month, but I couldn't resist. I turned to some distinguished friends of The Misread City, from different walks of life, to tell my readers which recent books they're excited about. (I'm eager, too, to have some new titles to augment my on-again, off-again collection of Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, James Fenton, Philip Larkin and Rilke.)

Let’s start with the fact that most educated people – including many literary people – read little or no poetry, especially recent poetry. It’s an issue that two members of my kitchen cabinet, poet/critic Dana Gioia and poet/ book publicist Kim Dower, have very different takes on.

"When people tell me -- and this is what they always tell me -- that they don't like most new poetry, I agree,” Dana says. “Most new poetry isn't very good. Poetry is one of those odd arts in which the work either has to be wonderful or it isn't worthwhile.  A mediocre movie might be watchable, but no one wants to spend two hours with a mediocre book of poems. It's like striking a book of soggy matches. None of them ignite.”

Kim, whose first poetry collection, Air Kissing on Mars, comes out in October on Red Hen, says this: “The state of poetry is so alive it's hyperventilating,” thanks to  an “abundance and variety of voices, styles, ways of seeing the world. Poetry is indeed the highest art and needn't be difficult or esoteric. Poetry should be enjoyed, read aloud, felt, inhaled.”

My third enthusiast has inhaled a lot -- maybe too much. “See, I can’t seem to stop myself,” Jeff Gordinier, a jet-setting Details writer and author of the Gen-X manifesto X Saves the World, wrote on this piece for the Poetry Foundation. “A compulsion to feed my poetry fix as soon as I hit town — any town, every town — seems, at least on the surface, like a safe indulgence.” But is it? (Read Jeff’s piece to find out.)

     Here are a few recommendation from Dana Gioia:

Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010).  Kay Ryan is funny, weird, and wise.  Her poems are very short, intricately written, and interwoven  with hidden rhymes.  This is not just one of the best books of poems this year. It will be one of the best books of the decade and beyond.  Ryan is the brilliant outsider looking at life from the odd and revealing angle. 

Katha Pollitt, The Mind-Body Problem (2009).  This is Pollitt's second collection of poems. Her first appeared 27 years ago.  This book is smart, witty, and consumately urbane -- depicting the highs and lows of the smart middle-class in middle age.  It is one of the few recent books that I have read cover to cover.  And then I read it again. Maybe more poets should wait 27 years between volumes.

A. E. Stallings Hapax (2006). Stallings is a Southern gal living in Greece, and she has a classical turn to her imagination.  Over the past ten years she has published so many ingenious and memorable poems--from the comic to heartbreaking--that she has become one of my favorite poets now writing.  If you doubt me, read her "First Love: A Quiz," a multiple choice poem that simultaneously tells the story of Persephone and a potentially murderous white-trash date in rhymed free verse.

David Mason, Ludlow: A Verse Novel (2007).  There are very few good book-length contemporary poems.  If the story is good, the poetry is usually missing.  If the language is strong, there is often very little happening.  Mason is a compelling storyteller who recreates the the violent Ludlow Massacre of 1914 when hired guns attacked striking Colorado miners and their families. This book reads better than most novels but adds the particular power of poetry to hit our emotions and imagination.  I was delighted to see the book belatedly featured a few weeks ago on the Lehrer News Hour--proving that poetry really is news that stays news.

    Here are Kim Dower’s recs:

Frank O'Hara, Selected Poems, A New Selection Edited by Mark Ford, published by Knopf (2008) - no one beats O'Hara when it comes to a fresh and original voice, New York school, the one poet who inspired and influenced so many. Everyday stories that linger for life.  Every word and beat is an exciting experience to cherish!  

Move right into Billy Collins who takes an ordinary experience and stretches it into a whole other way of seeing life. Any one of his books will toss readers into the appealing and unprecedented joys of poetry, and his latest, The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems is as accessible as the others, with poems that show us ordinary moments as ways to explore ourselves and the world around us: lying in bed, eating a ham sandwich, the heads  of roses beginning to droop . . .  

Denise Duhamel is an exciting and vibrant poet and KA-CHING published last year by the University of Pittsburgh Press is an invigorating and smashingly original book about luck. Funny and twisted, one of Denise's poems is also in a great new anthology that all poetry lovers -- old and new -- should have at their bedside: The Best American Poetry 2009, edited by David Wagoner, published by Scribner.  Her poem, "How It Will End," is a provocative and humorous look at relationships and takes the "he said, she said" theme into a divine dimension.  

Thomas Lux's newest book, GOD PARTICLES, published in 2008 by Houghton Mifflin is gorgeous, dark heartbreaking and funny.  

Zen monk Seido Ray Ronci, winner of this year's PEN Award for his marvelous book, THE SKELETON OF THE CROW, Ausable Press, 2008, offers readers his life's work, a book rich and simple, beautiful and intimate.  


And Kim Addonizio, delights with her newest, LUCIFER AT THE STARLITE, published by Norton - imaginative, luxurious, intimate and kickass. 

    Finally, these are some picks from Jeff Gordinier, who goes book shopping with Keanu Reeves here:

Take It, by Joshua Beckman (Wave Books, 2009) Beckman surveys the fractal dementia of our landscape ("The neighbors were going at it / with gas plungers again" and "Big eaters of America, I join you in your parade") with the eyes of a doomed and displaced Romantic.

Wind in a Box, by Terrance Hayes (Penguin, 2006) Living, breathing, swiveling, shape-shifting poems about (or not) Michael Jackson, Dr. Seuss, David Bowie, Jorge Luis Borges, Melvin Van Peebles, and picking up a woman in "deep blue denim" at a bus stop.

I Was the Jukebox, by Sandra Beasley (Norton, 2010) The wispy mists of contemporary poetry tend to make you yawn? Beasley is the bracing antidote. Consider the opening lines of her poem "Osiris Speaks": "I left my heart in San Francisco. / I left my viscera in the Netherlands. / I left my liver on the 42 Line, headed / from Farragut Square to the White House."

Rain, by Don Paterson (FSG, 2010) Paterson is a Scotsman who is skilled at writing vibrant, exquisite poems in just about every emotional and intellectual mode: He can be brusque and tender (consider "Why Do You Stay Up So Late?") and scholarly and sexy and hauntingly mystical and uproariously funny, sometimes all at once. His poems are so alive that it can feel as though they might start crawling across the page. 

Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

THIS Saturday I am quite honored to be moderating a panel with three very fine novelists of my generation at the LA Times Festival of Books. The panel -- "Writing the Fantastic" -- takes place at 2, in Moore 100 on the UCLA Campus.

One of my obsessions the last few years has been the move away from realism -- and in many cases toward genre -- by writers born in the late '60s and early '70s. I sort of associate the issue with Michael Chabon, who has written so well about the matter and exemplifies it in his own work -- here for more on that -- but he's hardly the only one. Recently I've been interested, for instance, in the lead essay on Ted Gioia's Conceptual Fiction site.)

(A year or so ago I wrote about the phenomenon in a Guardian piece called "How Ursula LeGuin Led a Generation Away From Realism," here.)

In any case, my distinguished panelist include:

Aimee Bender: Known to many readers, esp Angelenos, for her debut story collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Bender has a novel coming in June called The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, which continues her blending of folklore and whimsical surrealism. (Or is it folkloric whimsy -- I'm not quite sure, but I think of Chagall when I read her.)

Victor Lavalle: His novel Big Machine, which came out last summer, is my can't-put-down favorite right now. I came to this book cold, and don't want to spoil it for others, as the unfolding of a mystery that begins in a train station rest room is part of the delight of Big Machine. But this guy has a great touch. Lavalle grew up in Queens and is the youngest of the panel, born 1972. His novel drew raves from both the Wall Street Journal and Mos Def.

Lev Grosssman: I've admired Grossman's criticism, much of it in Time magazine, for quite a while now -- he's one of the most astute readers I know. His novel The Magicians has been a sensation, scoring The New York Times bestseller list, acclaim from the New Yorker and Junot Diaz. The novel superficially resembled the Harry Potter cycle in its school for magicians, but takes a much darker and more, um, adult turn.

Each of the authors has a blog, linked above, and I hope readers of The Misread City will check these three out whether they can attend the panel or not.

And remember: Though Lavalle and Grossman did not grow up on the West Coast, it was not their fault.

The Return Of Pavement

Pavement, arguably the finest indie-rock band of the '90s, has reunited for a spring and summer tour: I saw a very focussed and often wonderful show in Pomona, Calif, last night -- those guitars still sound so alien and familiar at the same time -- they will be at Coachella on Sunday, and a Sept. 30 Hollywood Bowl appearance has just been announced.

This was, of course, the unsentimental kind of Gen-X band that was not supposed to go in for a Boomer style reunion. My story in Saturday's LA Times is HERE.

Reunions typically take place for financial reasons, of course, but also because of warm, gauzy feelings between fans and the bands themselves. They’re the feelings that provoke Bic-lighter choruses, power ballads, and “farewell” tours with band members hugging. But punk – and the indie bands that took their cue from its idol-smashing style – was dryer-eyed.

“If you take the music of the Pixies and Pavement, you have some of the most unsentimental music imaginable,” Jeff Gordinier, a Details writer and author of the Generation X manifesto “X Saves the World,” told me. “A lot of Gen X music aims to eradicate sentimentality, which they associate with a Boomer sense of self-inflation and a utopian view of everything from saving the world to romance.”

Pavement was different. Their songs seemed to mean nothing, or everything: Unlike classic-rock bands that intoned lyrics about love and loss with poignant emphasis, Malkmus sang earnestly only when he got to the most nonsensical part of the song: “Praise the grammar police, set me up with your niece.” On the words that seemed to matter, he was as flatly detached as the band’s Sonic Youth-inspired guitar tunings.

In another break from ‘50s and ‘60s tradition, they didn’t come from a music scene with its layered traditions – Liverpool, Memphis, Minneapolis – but rather, seemingly simultaneously, from Stockton and Brooklyn, and the University of Virginia, where some members bonded over the arcane collection at the college radio station.

Some of what’s going on is just the inevitable return of a band people liked the first time and miss a decade later – just like any other rock reunion. After all, pining for the brighter moments of one’s past is not unique to any generation or musical ideology: We all feel it. Throw in wars and a recession and we may feel it more than usual.

But longing for a band like Pavement can signify a yearning for something broader: a craving for the days when the indie ethos seemed to be taking over the world, when Nirvana and Teenage Fanclub were giving Boomer icons a run for their money. It stirs indie-centric Xers like nothing else.

        

“Today, for a lot of us, the music we hear in the mainstream, at the Grammys, is just schlock,” says Gordinier, who is 43. “For a time, bands that mattered were on the radio. I don’t think it ended when Cobain died. I think it ended with Hansen – then we saw N’sync and Britney Spears, the revenge of the boy bands and bubblegum. The indie ethos just evaporated; it was rendered moot."

Gen X nostalgia, then, is essentially different from the earlier brand, in that it’s private, sub-cultural, instead of the mass-marketed public group hug that marks the Boomer version. This is different from, say, another Crosby, Stills and Nash reunion, Gordinier says. “Even though Pavement is doing a reunion tour, 99 and 3/4 percent of the country have no idea it’s happening. It’s for the people who were into it. It’s not gonna be referenced on ‘American Idol.’ ”

And because the songs haven’t been played to death, they’re retained some of their mystery. “Wanting to experience that mystery,” Gordinier says, “is a very different impulse, I think, than wanting to wallow in nostalgic bathos.”

Last night's show, by the way, included most of the obvious college-radio hits, as well as nearly all of Slanted and Enchanted. Can't wait to see em at the Bowl in September, where they will play with Sonic Youth.

New Editor at Paris Review

I've been hearing about the legendary Lorin Stein -- a hip young editor at Farrar Straus and Giroux, probably the coolest of the major houses -- for years now. So I wasn't alone in cheering when he was appointed the new editor of the storied Paris Review.

Stein -- who has edited novels by Denis Johnson, the press's translations of Bolano's Savage Detectives and 2666, and three of the five National Book Award finalists from 2008 and, more recently, Sam Lipsyte's The Ask and Elif Batuman's The Possessed -- takes over the job held for decades by George Plimpton and most recently by Philip Gourevitch.

(I recall meeting Plimpton at the LATimes Festival of Books a few years ago -- it was the most starstruck I have ever seen my then-girlfriend/now-wife.)

I've corresponded with Stein a few times and been struck by both his serious commitment to literature -- he is a burning advocate of the twisted poet Frederick Seidel -- and his highly developed Gen X irony. (Will the next Paris Review offer long interviews with Pavement's Stephen Malkmus, Lois and poet David Berman? The Misread City would not object.)

I spoke to Stein in '07 for THIS story in response to Granta's '07Best Young Author's issue, which included many foreign born authors. (The piece also includes interviews with then-Granta editor Ian Jack and critic Laura Miller.)

He talked about the days, as recently as the mid-'90s, when a literary review's author list could still enrage people:

"I'm not going to be able to walk into a party, or a bar, and get into that fight now," he said. "Because that discussion is over. The readership has fractured, and reads less, and spends more time e-mailing. And it makes less sense to talk about novelists now -- the really creative writing is being done in other genres" such as the personal essay, reportage and criticism.

"The novel has become like landscape painting," he said. "It's the 'top' genre, but not, in real life, the main one."

Here's looking forward to where Lorin Stein takes the Paris Review.

Favorite Guitarists, on Reflection

Since he is widely considered the finest rock musician on any instrument, it's hard to be surprised that Jimi Hendrix won my guitarists poll quite handily. (Is that sound disgruntled Keith Moon fans smashing things in the background?) But there were some surprises along the way.

To review, this poll asked people for their favorites -- a house- burning-down grab, not the most important historically or otherwise. It came from a less formal poll I took among friends and on Facebook to determine the six finalists.

One of the surprises was the enigma of Hendrix. As I've made clear, he needs no defense for me, and he more than DOUBLED the votes of the runner up. But I was struck by the number of people -- musicians and music critics, not casual fans -- who told me that Hendrix's songwriting and singing took him down a notch in their estimate, or that his playing was too flashy. (I would retort with much of Axis: Bold as Love to any of those charges.) The fact that some people voted, for instance, for Neil Young over the mighty Hendrix slightly baffles me. I found myself, incredibly, having to defend the man's work!

I knew that the great white-blues-Boomers -- Clapton, Jeff Beck, Page and Richards -- might not fare terribly well here. In part, that's because many of my Gen X peers came of age at a time when these axe-men, however formidable, had been played to death on "classic rock" radio. (In some ways our ears have been "colonized" by Boomer taste in all kinds of ways.) All said, surprised to see Richards -- the least clearly virtuosic of this crowd -- yielding the most votes.

Surprising also was the strength of Richard Thompson, who came in second. There were certainly guitarists a little older, some a lot younger, some to the left of him (in terms of dissonance or experimental flair) and many to the center of him. But he seems to hit a sweet spot for the readers of this blog. As I've said before, he's a Boomer Xers love, a Brit at home on the American West Coast -- an oddly hybrid and genuinely wide-ranging artist.

(I was reminded of this last night by a very fine RT show at Largo last night. That was one set of Thompson with a band trying out his very British upcoming album, followed by a second set of classics -- going as far back as Fairport's "Time Will Show the Wiser," including an acoustic "Al Bowlly's in Heaven" which tempted me to stop playing forever, and closing with the full band augmented by Teddy and Kamila Thompson, singing along with their father in the parts originally sung by their mother, Linda. Thompson's soloing was stunning and unpredictable thoughout, with its weird blend of Django, Chet Atkins, Britfolk and Sufi modalism.)

Thompson was followed by Neil Young, who were followed by Young, with Richards and Robert Quine (who bridged punk and alt-rock with sessions for Matthew Sweet and Lloyd Cole) tied. Nels Cline, who did better as a semi-finalist than he did on the full poll, came in sixth. Not bad for someone who was only known to fans of avant-rock a few years back; thank Wilco for that.

And here I will come out of the closet re my own tastes. Here are my favorites. Of course, it's a list that changes a little every week:

Hendrix, Richard Thompson, Roger McGuinn, George Harrison. Robert Quine, Peter Buck, Johnny Marr, Kevin Shields, Thurston Moore, Stephen Malkmus, Doug Martsch, Django Reinhardt, Alasdair MacLean, John Fahey.

This poll was only for rock guitarists -- I may run another on folk, jazz or blues guitarists.

Comments, please, folks.

The Twilight of the '80s with Richard Rushfield

FOR years before I met him, I knew of Richard Rushfield as this dark legend -- a nihilist wit who ran an underground humor magazine, an online savant with a Nixonian five-o' clock-shadow who had come into the LA Times to destroy the print world from within.

When I finally met Rushfield, at an art opening a few months back, I found him oddly innocent and charmingly bewildered, and I'm pleased to report that his new memoir has some of these same qualities. "Don't Follow Me I'm Lost: A Memoir of Hampshire College in the Twilight of the '80s" is about a time and place and a series of comic misadventures, but also very much the story of a dazed, Hawaiian-shirted Angeleno lost in a particularly decadent niche of East Coast culture. I spoke briefly to him about his experience.

Q: What made you want to go to Hampshire, which by the '80s was already a legendary hippie school?

A: I grew up here in Los Angeles, so I always thought about going back East for college. When you go to Crossroads [prestigious LA high school] you pretty much think, by 16, that you know everything you need to know. How dare any college tell me what to study? So the progressive education appealed to me. Going to school in the woods of New England was a kind of idyllic fantasy -- but this was kind of the "Mad Max" version.

Q: Your first night there was a pretty embarrassing welcome to the college experience.

A: My first experience getting drunk on red table wine included emptying the contents to my stomach on a hall which didn't much want me there in the first place. Their affection for me did not increase.

Q: I get a sense there was a real culture clash for you as a California kid?

A: It's a very different world there, and it got stranger as it went along. If you're from Los Angeles, you're presumed to barely be able to spell your name -- they speak very slowly for you. And the hippie culture doesn't really exist here -- prep school kids who didn't bathe, with heavy sweaters, driving Volvos...?

Q: It sounds like you eventually found your tribe.

A: It was a school of outcasts where I thought I'd fit in great. But I had to find the outcasts' outcasts. This was a group [known as the Supreme Dicks] whose response to the culture was to wholly check out, burning the bridges with society. The ethos came to be known as "the grunge era" years later, where to have any motivation or enthusiasm was the most uncool thing you could do. Ambition, relationships, goals, studies -- you'd never heard of them.

When the grunge era came around, it was the first mass movement with absolutely no agenda. It was Gen X's one moment of ruling the stage, in between the Boomers and their kids. And our moment was to say, Let's stay in and do nothing.

Q: Does reflecting on those years tell us anything about higher education, Miami Vice, the Reagan '80s, or generational change?

A: Certainly if I could look at myself at age 17, I could conclude that a 17-year-old should not be entrusted with his own eduction.

I also feel like we came at the end of this enormous party, from the disco '70s to the go-go '80s, before things became very earnest and political with Gen Y. We showed up at the party at 3 a.m., after the buffet had been cleaned out and there were just a few cheese cubes left. And the people right outside started this really earnest movement.

More Rushfield here.

"After the End of History"

IT'S the kind of phrase, however memorable, that the speaker probably wishes he could take back. when francis fukuyama responded to the fall of berlin wall -- the close of the cold war -- by calling it "the end of history" it seemed to make sense, and it fit into an argument by postmodern scholars -- fredric jameson especially -- that we were living in a context-free epoch that had no use for history either in its literature or popular culture.

but history continued to happen, and this week the berlin wall moment is back in the news. i'm also reading an intriguing new book in which samuel cohen, an english professor at the university of missouri, argues that history did not disappear from our literature either. cohen sees the 90s -- the period between "the end of history" and 9/11's "end of irony" -- as "an interwar decade," and looks at six of the best novels the period produced and two that came right after.

those novels are by thomas pynchon, philip roth, toni morrison, tim o'brien, joan didion, jeffrey eugenides, jonathan lethem and don delillo, all hefty books well worth the study.

i know cohen only slightly, from speaking by phone for two stories on updike, here and here, and i like his gen-x perspective. updike himself doesnt much figure in the new book, but he offers this delicious epitaph from "rabbit at rest": " 'i miss it,' he said. 'the cold war. it gave you a reason to get up in the morning.'"

so i'm enjoying cohen's tightly and clearly written "after the end of history: american fiction in the 1990s" -- and not just because it's the kind of study i might have written had i stayed in the academy.

Lydia Millet vs. Domestic Realism

ONE of the key impulses of my generation -- what we used to call generation x -- has been the move away from old-school psychological realism into fiction's "borderlands." that's michael chabon's term, and he's generally talking about the wild frontier between literary fiction and fantasy, pulp crime, sci-fi, lovecraftian horror and comics.

but lydia millet is less interested in those fan-boy genres and more committed in her own weird soup of caricature, psychological extremity, obsession, and calvino-esque possibilities. (anyone who's lived in LA knows that those can actually be categories of realism here, but that's another conversation.) her characters are rarely likable, they're sometimes not even feasible, but they're often compelling.

here is my interview with millet from last year, when her bracing short novel "how the dead dream was released on soft skull press, then run by richard nash. millet is also an alum of what i call "the school of flynt," as in hustler: various porn and ammo magazines were her MFA program.

millet has a new story collection, "love in infant monkeys," which is getting good notices -- here is a review from the new york times book review.

this is a writer whose assumptions differ from some of my own, but who thinks in truly original ways.