a grammar

meaning. (this is not a picture of me)

The purpose of this blog, so far as there is one, is to talk about rhetoric and popular culture in some critical sense. (Hopefully that goal will seem less vague as time passes.) As such, I’m trying to be alert to intersections of those two things that amaze me, or irritate me, or stump me. One thing that definitely qualifies is Bookslut’s interview with writer / poet / internet user / Tao Lin acolyte Brandon Scott Gorrell (pictured, right).

I won’t offer any big opinions on either writer. You can take up your own visceral hatred of them and their alleged ilk, as others have; believe me, I will totally understand. (A recent Guardian piece casually summed them up as “sarcastic, bored and a bit spoilt, but nevertheless great at selling the idea of being sarcastic, bored and a bit spoilt.”) They are, so far as I can tell, purveyors of something that’s often felt to have passed its sell-by date: the hip young writer whose world is a flat and uninflected and maybe meaningless blur of modern technology and brand names and popular culture and mundane anomic probably-meaningless interpersonal encounters and maybe some drinking and shoplifting, to all of which the author shrugs and says, well, that’s what my life is, man. The 1990s vogue was to be pointedly absurd and/or parodic and/or “postmodern” about such things, but these folks are far more in earnest, more attached to real-world flatness. They sound eighties. Gorrell starts the interview mentioning Bret Easton Ellis. Then he mentions a Barthelme, but not the one you’d think, not Donald; Gorrell goes for “K-mart Realist” Frederick Barthelme. His poems can read like strings of depressed Facebook status updates—that’s part of the pitch—and occasionally they’ll tap something: usually disgust, boredom, loneliness, fecklessness.

But we’re talking about rhetoric, and just look at what a carefully groomed rhetorical performance Gorrell puts on in that e-mail interview—the assembled tics; the one-word answers; the incessant scare-quoting of words, to the point of intentional comic effect; the flat anomic distance and possibly self-deprecation and possibly just plain depressing honesty brought to a description of something as basic as wanting people to read your writing and think you’re cool:

“Writing the poems made me feel less anxious because afterward I often looked at the poems and had vague notions of myself as a ‘depressed individual with beautiful, hidden secrets that would someday be discovered, but possibly never discovered (deepening the beauty of the hidden secrets).’ I would also experience these notions from another’s perspective, often a girl that I made up in my head, dressed in hipster clothes… .  I would even ‘go so far’ as to, after finishing a poem, go to my MySpace profile and look at the photos that I uploaded of myself while attempting to perceive them from the perspective of a ‘fan’ that had just read the poem, and I would see myself as ‘deep,’ ‘interesting’ and thus, I think, maybe, ‘sexy.’”

Oddly enough, this kind of archness actually can be earnest, actually can address the point, as when Gorrell’s asked what he finds it difficult to write about:

“I find it hard to write about the sensation of ‘meaning’ or ‘life.’ … I want to write a novel in which the main character experiences short moments of meaning (in the fashion that I do in my own life), and I want to be able to describe those moments metaphorically, yet not in a ‘totally gay’ way.”

Which is at least honest. It also sort of restates a question David Foster Wallace raised, around the time Gorrell was in fourth grade, in an essay called “E Unibus Pluram”: the question of speaking sincerely about “meaning” and “life” in a world that feels irony-steeped and hyper-mediated and somehow resistant to exactly those things—a world the writers of 1993 described in absurdist fantasies and the writers of now seem ready to describe as just the world they walk around in all day. The bulk of Wallace’s fiction can be read as a successful fight with this issue, a fight not just to describe our conditions as maybe too information-saturated, pleasure-addicted, irony-dependent, and all too aware of what’s “totally gay,” but also to talk seriously about how we can and do and should approach meaning and life within that environment. Because if you can’t do that, he’d say, you will be just royally hosed.

This isn’t a fight for all readers or all writers; many people don’t experience it as a defining issue. Personally, I do think it’s a important fight; Gorrell seems like evidence of that. A writer who scare-quotes all his words and says he struggles to write anything containing meaning: however you feel about it, it’s certainly evidence of something or other. The thing is, Gorrell (not to mention Tao Lin) doesn’t particularly sound like he’s fighting that fight; he sounds like he’s writing, like plenty before him, about losing it. On the internet. But he’s still young.

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