A Time For Fists

In an earlier article, Who Of Us Also Stumbled Past The Work Of Jonathan Lethem Until David Foster Wallace Up And Bid Us Adieu, I have written, with praise, words to the effect that Jonathan Lethem was the one person we could count on to fill the void of losing David Foster Wallace in regards to the clever and brilliant essays our victim of suicide wrote. The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem was the one book I believed could save us after losing David Foster Wallace, not to mention Hunter Thompson.

In another article, BETWEEN PARENTHESIS by Roberto Bolaño, I praised my uncovering this past summer of the Chilean writer, Roberto Bolano, who in his essays proved his honesty and courage to direct his personal contempt for bad writing and those certain inferior, but famous, guilty scribes to his writing on the page. Between Parentheses was chock full of brilliant pieces of offense, and clearly educational in many ways for writers known and unknown, good and bad. Bolano also wrote two books of short stories that read like essays and are nothing short of the first rank in literature. The Insufferable Gaucho and Last Evenings on Earth share the same lofty place on my library shelf as Between Parentheses. For those interested I also wrote a piece about the first titled, The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolano.

But these above-mentioned books cannot save these two writers, Lethem and Bolano, from my own contempt for bad writing and wasted pages certain to add to our landfills and the litter in our streets. Bolano's book of poetry, The Romantic Dogs, is nothing but total crap. To think he considered himself a poet first and a novelist second, to me, disregards his great gift for just talking to us in the form of his essays. Bolano is no better at poetry than I am at making bread. He doesn't have a gift for poetry, and no amount of anointments by the official literati will convince me otherwise. There was not one decent poem in the entire collection. As for Lethem, his Kafka Americana (a shared authorship with Carter Scholz) was a complete failure as well, as has been any fiction Lethem has ever put to pen except for maybe his novel Motherless Brooklyn which is actually readable, enjoyable, and worth the time. But it is nothing great. Titles such as The Fortress of Solitude are a bore and impossible to suffer through.

How is it that writers can be so gifted in one genre or another, and be so pitiful in another and not even know it? (Admissible evidence: Jonathan Galassi. See my article How To Write A Poem.) Just because you want to be a fiction writer does not mean to actually publish in order to be one. I do not have to be told not to write novels as I am aware it is impossible for me. Cormac McCarthy has done it already in spades. That does not mean I haven't tried. I have. But no novel of mine has ever been published, and shouldn't be. I have thrown them all in the trash, which is what Lethem and Bolano should have done, as Hemingway and David Foster Wallace should have done in the end before they committed suicide.

Some might say who am I to talk? as I have three books of poetry (another one in the galley stage), have written five screenplays, directed and photographed four short films, have published two books of my own images, and I write articles like this one you are reading. My editor and friend, Gordon Lish, agrees I should not write novels, that I am a "born" poet and should concentrate on writing poems, but he loves my films and says I am a "great" film maker too which pleases me very much. He also likes my photographs. He hasn't seen nor heard about my journalistic rants and would most likely look on them unfavorably only because he would say it is a waste of valuable time that could be spent instead creating art or making love to someone. But the impulse to take a stand, to be on record for something I am passionate about, and to fight the good fight even if I lose is an impulse I cannot refuse myself no matter how much good therapy calls me out on my self-destructive behavior.

The title of this piece, A Time for Fists , was pilfered from a quote of Roberto Bolano's that he used to refer to the critical stance taken in his essays. For those of us who think me hateful or vitriolic about bad poetry and sappy affairs of the heart in fiction, please read the Bolano essays. They are important to literature and the protection of it from the massive herd all gathering together in a corner of our world. And while you are at it, get your eyes on anything Thomas Bernhard wrote and take a ride on his wild side of ungraciousness and contempt as only one true master has really been able to do, masterly.