Magic Hours (10 page)

 

 

Of the many words and phrases hip-hop culture has injected into in the lexical bloodstream of America, few equal the brilliant definitional succinctness of “player hater.” Player hating is not the same thing as jealously, exactly, though jealously obviously forms a keystone of the average player hater's emotional architecture. Player hating is less rational—not to mention less melancholy—than jealousy. This is not Shakespeare's “green-eyed monster” but a merciless, fire-breathing Godzilla. And the ULA takes player hating to a plane of Iagoan proportions. They are player haters who hate so purely and reflexively that they have run through all the players. Thus they constantly elevate non-players to player status, just so they can hate them, too.

One senses something of the ULA's transparent hunger for celebrity from the
kind
of the writer they consistently assail. All are young, thought to be wealthy, usually male, usually live in New York City or environs, and possess to the utmost that
highly qualified species of fame known as literary fame. Rick Moody has been pursued by the ULA so ferociously he is probably checking his shirts for a stenciled-on “Valjean” by now. Jonathan Franzen is another target often fired upon, as is Jeffrey Eugenides. The ULA has virtually nothing to say about the actual
work
of the writers it hates, other than to point out that it is “much-hyped” or some similar approximation. The ULA's hatred of Moody appears largely centered upon the fact that Moody is independently wealthy (or that his family is—the ULA seems to believe this is the same thing, which maybe it is, but it is hard to see how this is the business of anyone whose last name is not Moody or relevant to whether or not his work is any good) and that he accepted a grant. Franzen's doctrinal breach seems relatively minor: he accepted a grant after becoming unbelievably famous (though it was applied for before that crime). One of the more realish pieces of literary criticism to be found in the available ULA oeuvre concerns Eugenides's novel
Middlesex
. The review, written by Michael Jackman, concerns itself almost entirely with demolishing Eugenides's vision of “white flight” from Detroit, though it saves a little room to attack the use of “imagination” in writing. “Perhaps,” Jackman writes bitterly, “I don't have the precious imagination that Eugenides seems to be blessed with.... Yes, writing can reach inside and find out what's within us. It certainly can cover what's happening inside the mind and below the belt. All I ask is that we turn that same scrutiny on the world around us, on the injustices and great crimes.” Although it is nice to see a writer responding to a novel with something more potent than typical book-report musings, it would be hard to imagine a more ax-grindingly butt-headed reading of
Middlesex
. Dave Eggers, however, earns from the ULA a highly specialized anger—that of class betrayal. “The Dave” (in ULA parlance) emerged, after all, from a zine background
similar to that of the ULA's founding members. What appears to bother the group most intensely is that Eggers is doing exactly what they would all like to be doing, only much better. ULA contributor Steve Kostecke all but admits as much in the micro-essay about a
McSweeney's
event: “After [the reading] came a short play and, at a local bar, music performed by a band.... These things in combo
I myself had envisioned years ago
[emphasis most certainly mine] .... The McSweeners understand... that those who are easily bedazzled by the scent of things literary will react to them with hyperbole.... What they need... is an injection of substance, of the writing that now only exists in the raw authenticity of the zine scene.”

Perhaps now is the time to examine some of that raw authenticity.

 

 

It should immediately be said that the ULA has yet to find and develop its Jack Kerouac. Or its Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Or even its Ed Sanders. Nonetheless, though most of the work available on its website is bad, it is always bad in an interesting way. “Before You Know It,” an essay by
Emerson Dameron
, contains several florid avalanches of prose that in some writers' hands are known as paragraphs:
and I have to stop, though Dameron doesn't. (Incidentally:
Emerson
Dameron.
Anyone blessed with a name like that has no call writing so poorly.) Another essay, “Style vs Substance” by Chris Zee, argues against the workshop:

Good points all, and these are points I have heard numberless editors and agents make. These are also points I have heard writers make. These are also points I have heard people who teach in workshops make. These are also points I have heard in workshops.

Prose that has passed through not a few of these ULA writers' minds does not always survive its transit. What does survive is usually trembling, starved, and weak. It subsists on a thin broth of cliche. Thus, any dash is a “mad dash.” The past is inevitably the “not-too-distant past.” We have “the daily grind,” “the unwritten law,” stories occurring in “a sterile laboratory” Things “cross the mind,” get “stamped out,” and are kept “under hats.” One essay, its author an evident cruiserweight of cliche, ends with this left-hook, right—jab combo: “Because you only get so many chances. It'll be over before you know it.”

One of the few pieces of fiction posted on the ULA's website is an excerpt from Michael Jackman's
The Corridor
. Jackman's is one of the more angrily eloquent voices within the
ULA, and his pleas for honest, socially relevant fiction appear the most heartfelt. Thus, I read his fiction with great interest. What I found, though, was an artless ramble. I do not mean artless in the positive sense of seeming unforced or natural. I mean it in the sense of having no art. “I have always been a procrastinator,” is how Jackman's narrator introduces himself to us, “and at the very last minute I had to get serious about finding a new place to live—I had told Henry I would be out of his apartment by the end of November, which was two days away. I needed cheap digs in a hurry.” When Jackman's narrator suspenselessly opens the newspaper to find an apartment—its $200-a-month rent serves the same grandstandingly sociological purpose here as a Thomas Pink tie does in the work of Bret Easton Ellis—he decides to go have a look. (“I had no choice!”) The apartment is in a bad neighborhood (barking dogs, trash, chain-link fences), details Jackman does not insert so much as rivet into his work. At least the apartment is not in the suburbs. All the same,

The excerpt staggers on, as though trying defibrillate the suburban heart from its living bourgeois death: “When I had tossed the last of my boxes on the living room floor, I checked the power in the bathroom, but it wasn't on yet. I checked the stove. No gas hissed to life. I couldn't even boil a cup of tea!” Here we have fiction of negative perfection: so boringly real it
cannot
be read.

I held out greater hope for the work published in the ULA's zine,
Slush Pile
. One of the writers the ULA hypes most sincerely in
Slush Pile
is a young woman—I am guessing she is young—named Urban Hermitt. A Hermitt story (or something) entitled “‘I Don't Know'” is about a young woman named Urban Hermitt and her crazy adventures:

It is not that Ms. Hermitt is not able to write, or is not, often, sort of amusing. Of her crazy adventures in Mexico, she notes, ‘Only eat food served to you in hotels,' the travel book on Baja Mexico says. ‘And if you eat food from a street vendor, make sure you take pepto—bismol.' These travel books make all street vendors seem EVIL. And then they expect you to down this ‘pink' liquid called pepto-bismol which is full of all this chemicalized crap!” Hermitt's problem is that she, like Jackman, has mistaken emotion and purity of intent for art. Wenclas has defended Hermitt's work by saying, “There can be no rewrites.... Attempts to impose order—grammar, spelling, and logic—would cause the fragile bursts of immediacy to fall apart.” To that one is tempted to argue that poiaurna fopiuay bnvmnnab.

Another story, “Weddings in Purgatory” by Cullen Carter (whose bio says, winningly, that he “likes beer”), has any number of paragraphs filled with writing like this:

And yet ULA members do not always write badly. One of the group's more prominent writers is Jack Saunders, a Santa Clausishly lovable sort who for years has been fruitlessly pestering the publishing world. I received a letter from Saunders in 2000, shortly after I published an essay in
The Boston Review
about the historical obtuseness of the publishing world's judgment, for instance its rejections of Melville and Whitman. Saunders's letter—angry but cheerful—contained excerpts of the many brush-offs he has received from editors, not all of them unkind. (It also, somewhat alarmingly, included a photo of him and a topless woman.) Saunders all but dared me to put my money where my essay was and publish him at Henry Holt and Company, where I then worked. I enjoyed what I read, but since I regarded—and regard—Saunders's work roughly as salable as a Hefty bag filled with used hypos, I was too depressed even to write him back. I also suspected that, if I did, I was going to get an extremely loquacious pen pal (and perhaps even increasingly nude photos). In an excerpted essay about the novel's future, Saunders writes:

Which may be dippy and which may glisten with more than a little old-coot-type treacle, but it is also pretty hard to argue and bravely unfashionable to say. Especially for an author like Saunders, who has boasted of writing nine novels in six months. At the very least, one senses a real human heart within this sentiment rather than the sort of sense-deadened literary adept whom Borges once criticized as writing as though it were “a trick they had learned.... They know that when they have to write, then, well, they have to suddenly become rather sad and ironic.”

A 1997 essay by King Wenclas, “Living in the Real America,” is equally worth considering. “Currently I work as a release clerk/ truck dispatcher for a customshouse broker at Detroit's Ambassador Bridge,” the essay begins, “the great commercial NAFTA gateway of North America.” The point here is thankfully not trade-and-tariff politics but the plight of many Americans to make what is sometimes cruelly known as a living. “When it rains,” Wenclas notes of his workspace,

What sort of people work these jobs? Well, Wenclas tells us: