Colin Marshall

My favorite thing Marginal Revolution

I aspire to Marginal Revolution author Tyler Cowen’s level of cultural openness. He seems to exercise it at all times, without exception. I know this from reading his blog, and I know this from interviewing him twice on The Marketplace of Ideas, and I received a reminder of this in a recent Businessweek article:

Tyler Cowen has read what's listed in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, though not, he concedes, every single last one of the Icelandic sagas. He rereads what you probably haven't heard of, like Anton Chekhov's Sakhalin Island. For the Brazil trip, in case he runs out of new books, he has also brought Neal Stephenson's 1,100-page Cryptonomicon, which he has already read. Fiction slows him down, he says, which makes packing easier. He carries a Kindle but reads paper when he can; he says he's invested too much time on the rhythm of how the eye tracks the page. Several people have told me the same story about Cowen: They have watched him read, and he scans a page as others might scan a headline.

[ … ]

Since the late '90s much of Cowen's work has looked at the economics of culture. He consumes art and music at the rate he does books, but unlike most critics he doesn't sniff that markets have either ruined culture or brought it low.

[ … ]

After Cowen gets back from Brazil, we meet at Eyo Restaurant & Sports Bar in Falls Church, Va., an Ethiopian place that sits in a strip mall underneath several housing towers. This is yet another of Cowen's enthusiasms: searching for food, and recording it on Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide, another blog. He's included rules on how to find a restaurant and how to order when you get there in a book, Discover Your Inner Economist. For one: Order the strangest thing on the menu—chances are the chef put the most work into it. And the best ethnic food, he writes, is prepared at strip malls. He orders for me, then asks whether I eat raw beef.

I didn’t used to care much about geography at all, although that term makes it sound academic — maybe I mean I didn’t used to care about place. Over the last decade, this changed with a vengeance; I now feel much more in line with the highly place-oriented way Tyler Cowen seems to think about culture. You can see this in my favorite series of posts he makes: “My Favorite Things”. To read these is to know how much culture you’ve missed — or, put more happily, how much culture you have yet to savor.

From "My Favorite Things Hungary": "Movies: Bela Tarr, Satantango.  It’s over seven hours long, but don’t be put off.  It has some of the best shots of grazing cows and angry peasants committed to reel, and I wanted it to be longer." From "My Favorite Things South Africa": "Music: Where to start?  Malanthini, for one.  As for mbqanga collections, The Indestructible Beat of Soweto series is consistently excellent.  Singing in an Open Space, Zulu Rhythm and Harmony 1962-1982 is a favorite.  Random gospel and jazz collections often repay the purchase price and in general random CD purchases in these areas bring high expected returns." From "My Favorite Things Egypt": "Philosopher: Must I say Plotinus?  I don't find him especially readable." From "My Favorite Things Turkey": "Cynic: Diogenes, who in a few ways was an early version of Robin Hanson, though I am not suggesting Robin is a cynic in the lower case sense." From "My Favorite Things Grenada": "Short story writer: Paul Keens-Douglas.  This pick is a no-brainer.  Here is Keens-Douglas telling a story.  Here is Keens-Douglas doing a comedy routine.  I used to have some very good cassettes of him telling folk tales." From "My Favorite Things Mars": "Album about: David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Venus and Mars is not overall a good album; it is mostly dull and overproduced.  So Bowie is a clear winner here."

I plan to “borrow” this format for a post about Mexico City (I find myself more city- than country-oriented) before I leave for there. We’ll see how it stacks up.

The wise man

When I started writing on Livejournal in high school, a series of still-inexplicable events led me to re-encounter an old friend from elementary school there: Chris, the Livejournalist formerly known as cobalt999. Through him, I found my way into a more culturally and intellectually stimulating circle than I’d ever experienced before, albeit one in which I didn’t really belong. I found my way into a circle of — not to put too fine a point on it, but — homosexual Livejournaling teenage geeks. Smart, engaged with ideas, skilled with the written word, not contributors to any of my girl-related psychodramas: the ideal peer group!

One other Livejournalist, one of the group’s most well-respected, didn’t seem to fit in: Tom, known as tomcan, and later as cool_moose, a man of fewer words and a much earlier birthdate than everyone else. I admit to looking askance, at first, at that “1937” in his profile. What kind of sixtysomething guy, I thought, talks to gay teen geeks on a blogging platform geared toward 14-year-old Russian girls? Yet nothing he did or said came off at all like the acts or words of a sketchmeister — precisely the opposite, in fact. I had to know: what was Tom’s deal?

We cobble together mental models of people, especially those with whom we rarely communicate, out of conversations, rumors, writings, artifacts — non-contiguous fragments. I’ve built a mental Tom both gloriously storied and seemingly incoherent: he made money doing something with lumber mill control systems in the seventies? And despite coming up in Seattle, he became a Canadian patriot? And he helped paraplegics, including a close friend and former hockey player, restart their lives? And he took in kids whose families had failed them for reasons as petty as their sexual orientation? And he became beloved in South America while working with Chilean dissidents and Bolivian orphans? And he lived through a bout of cancer? (“Cancer died of me,” he insisted.) And he offered a font of wise counsel to young people — including young people I count as friends — whose potential he understood when nobody else seemed to?

I picked up these facts and guesses, extrapolations and interpolations, overstatements and understatements from Tom’s sparse Livejournal posts, answers to my curiosity-driven questions to friends like Chris (who were much, much closer to him), and conversations that sprouted from Tom’s many comments on my own posts. We didn’t agree on much, worldview-wise; half the time, we’d hit philosophical bedrock on some economic issue that he saw in moral terms, but I didn’t. (He liked to respond to my pro-market positions by evoking Pinochet’s death squads.) As much as I wish I could say I’ve come around to Tom’s distinctive brand of left-wing views — views won with superior age and experience — I find myself with less involved with morality than ever. But he indirectly taught me an even more useful lesson: even basic perceptual clashes shouldn’t prevent you from having friendly, fruitful conversations with people. Quite the contrary.

Despite talking to him on the net for nearly a decade, I never could assemble all I knew about Tom — or thought I knew about Tom — into one clear picture. I met him once, in 2008; surely I could have just sat him down and said, “So tell me your life story” — I’ll bet he would have — and proceeded to straighten out all the guesses, gaps, and imaginings in my knowledge of his life. But would I really prefer that? Do I need to assemble Tom into one clear picture? Doesn’t the hazy, adventurous, geographically multifarious, sometimes self-contradictory legend of my distant elder sparring partner — CanLit as rewritten by Borges in a pastiche of a foreign sixties protest song — hold its own kind of fascination?

You’ve surely sensed an elegiac tone here, and indeed, I recently heard from Chris that Tom has passed this mortal coil. I hadn’t communicated much at all with him in the last few years, despite often wondering how he was doing up there in comparatively frozen British Columbia. That I never once actually asked him might cast me in a damning light, or even point to troubling social-psychological issues on my part. But I’ve long thought of it, with woeful resignation, as my normal behavior, albeit one of which I should’ve broken myself long ago. Tom clearly didn’t have the same problem; I’ll add that chapter to his mythos.

The particular sadness of Zappos

How could I go to Mexico City this fall without a pair of Mexico 66es? Designed in anticpation of Mexico City's 1968 Summer Olympics by Onitsuka Tiger, they remain available today in a prime example of the aesthetic timelessness — or at least wide-timespan-iness — I so desire in my wear, foot- and otherwise. They belong in my sneaker pantheon alongside the equally venerable Adidas Samba and Puma Turin. You may call me foolish to spend money on this sort of thing instead of saving up to move to Los Angeles, but I see Onitsuka Tigers as more like investments in my aesthetic future. Besides, they represent the meeting of two places, Japan and Mexico, that fascinate me — in shoe form! Could you really expect me to resist?

I bought my pair, along with a pair of Onitsuka Tiger's nearly-as-timeless Ultimate 81s, at Zappos, a site that seems to have made itself synonymous with shoes-on-the-net. I found their prices reasonable; I found their process painless. Indeed, Zappos publicly prides itself on being a service company first and foremost, but one that just happens to sell shoes. Its CEO, Tony Hsieh, has become something of a celebrity on the back of the company's cheerful ethos. (Zappos Family Core Value #5: "Pursue Growth and Learning". Zappos Family Core Value #9: "Be Passionate and Determined".) The man even wrote a book called Delivering Happiness, and I can't call it mistitled. The sight of that chunky, substantial Zappos box on my doorstep did indeed make me happy. Wearing the shoes inside makes me even happier.

And yet, pondering the existence of Zappos, I feel a debilitating wave of sadness. Despite my satisfaction with every stage of my interaction with the company, I can't get over the fact that people get up in the morning and devote eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve hours — the prime of their day! — to an internet shoe store. The very idea thet some of these employees might devote their entire careers — let's face it, means their entire lives — to this cause crumples me under an onrush of nihilism. Third-hand word from business articles tells me that Zappos has happier, more satisfied employees than most comparable firms, too, so why should I feel so sad? Hell, even the very lowest man on the Zappos totem pole makes more money than I do.

Yet even the vast fortune of the highest man on the Zappos totem pole — Hsieh made $214 million in the company's sale to Amazon — could not lure me into the internet shoe industry. This sounds stupid even as I type it. Croesan wealth and the knowledge that I've played a part in making people happy by helping them get boxes full of Mexico 66es? Who could ask for more than that? What could possibly be wrong with me?

These thought crimes lead friends to accuse me of professing belief in capitalism without really believing in capitalism. A real capitalist would watch the invisible hand of the market rush to fill the world's Japanese shoe needs and get all moist-eyed — with joy. A real capitalist wouldn't puss out and wring their hands about the abyss that must a life dedicated to figuring out a better way to sell shoes on the internet must surely be. I understand all this intellectually, but, for some reason, a part of me will always believe that every Silicon Valley multimillionaire harbors a quashed composer of atonal symphonies deep inside.

Cat and dog media

I trust you’ve heard pet owners’ pointless arguments about the merits of cats versus the merits of dogs. As a non-pet owner — isn’t the whole idea of civilization to keep hair and poop out of our homes? — I listen to this unresolvable debate from the sidelines. Nevertheless, I spent childhood more than partial to cats, forming pleasant memories poring over page-a-day cat calendars and books about the various breeds (favorites: the Scottish Fold, the Japanese Bobtail, the swimming Turkish Van, the water bottle-textured Sphynx). I loved the aesthetics of cats, which felt tied up, somehow, in their behavior: they liked your appreciation, but they didn’t seem to need it.

Contrast that with dogs, who, according to the “dog people” lobbying in their favor, rush elatedly up to meet you when you come home. I get that, in the abstract, but I can’t help quoting Meet the Parents: “You need that assurance, do you? You prefer an emotionally shallow animal?” And I see the contrast between these animals as having even more relevance to movies than that. Doesn’t film, television, music, literature, radio, the web — doesn’t all media — break down along cat-dog lines? Either it dashes right up to you, tongue out, pleading for your attention, or it strikes a pose wherever it happens to sit, meeting you halfway if you care to approach — and not particularly minding if you don’t?

Of the myriad possible cinematic sins, only one strikes me as unforgivable: giving in to and thus baldly expressing terror that the audience might stop watching. I figured this out while watching Slumdog Millionaire, a movie constantly crapping its pants over the slightest possibility that you’ll look away. This syndrome breeds countless other ills, including but not limited to the tiresome “hyperkineticism” of cinema’s past 25 years and the blunt melodrama of its last hundred. While I no longer have any skin in the cat versus dog game, I care deeply about the cat versus dog media game.

Cat media: Bookworm. Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Charlie Rose. Jim Jarmusch. Entitled Opinions. 3:AM Magazine. Experimental video. In Our Time. David Lynch. New Directions Books. With Hidden Noise. Editions of Contemporary Music. A Piece of Monologue.

Dog media: Jerry Bruckheimer. Reality television. Hot-talk stations sweatily eyeing their Arbitron numbers. Fully SEO’d Social Media Hubs. 24-hour coverage of celebrity dating. Designed-to-be-viral videos. Gawker. Cable news broadcasts crammed with scrolling sub-screens. Dan Brown. The Black Eyed Peas. Maxim. “Productivity” pr0n. Turbocharged tips to jack your strat.

Yes, I admit to the simplification of presenting two extremes on an actual spectrum. But consider the core idea: cat media knows it’s good, and thus doesn’t mind if you don’t seek it out right away. Dog media doesn’t care if it’s good, as long as you’re absorbing it. I only want to experience media that has the confidence of a cat, media that doesn’t care whether or not I like it, media that refuses to fall all over itself in the mad scramble for my attention, my ticket sales, my quarter-hours spent listening, my page views. (Bonus points if it goes in the water, if it’s hairless, if its ears fold down, or if it’s got a cool poofy tail.)

David Fincher: The Social Network

The Social Network’s script grew out of a book by Ben Mezrich, who takes true stories of youngsters who make piles of money by outwitting some system, organization, or market and casts them into the breathless prose of embossed-cover airport novels. I read Bringing Down the House, his first of these, years ago, and I couldn’t quite get a handle on its core story about a pack of MIT kids’ elaborate card-counting scheme through all the shimmering please-adapt-me fog. By the time he got down to the “true story” of some guy who seems to have done something or other in a Dubai oil market, his empire seemed to have caught fire. Mark Zuckerberg and co. put it out right in the nick of time.

Given their artlessness, why do people read these books? True, it takes a rare ingenuity to figure out how to profit from a casino or an index futures market or Harvard’s student photo database or whatever, but these strike me as parlor tricks — highly lucrative parlor tricks, but parlor tricks nonetheless. I have to give Mark Zuckerberg more respect than the Aspergian aspirational randoms that star in Mezrich’s other narratives of choice, though, because at least he made something. Alas, he made an online social network, which falls pretty far down my list of impressive accomplishments, even when it results in becoming a billionaire and the most famous member of one’s — our — generation.

“I was hoping the people of the world might be united by something more interesting, like drugs or an armed struggle against the undead,” David Sedaris wrote about his IBM engineer dad’s early enthusiasm for computers. “Unfortunately, my father's team won, so computers it is.” Despite having been way into computers as a kid — computer games, specifically — and enjoying certain of their functions as an adult — podcasting, specifically — they often fail to inspire me in adulthood. That my peers seem mainly to find success with things like web startups, apps, and viral videos irks me; for all the innovation, these projects tend to strike me as just a bunch of undifferentiated internet stuff.

Cinema, however, has only grown in its ability to fire me up. (I know full well that, in, like, 1910, people probably dismissed everything on film as a high-tech waste of time too, but I’m too dumb to grasp the implications of that.) As lukewarm as I felt about an adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s account of Facebook, at least it took the form of a genuine movie, theatrically screened, instead of, say, a Flash animation. And how about its unlikely combination of creators? Aaron Sorkin writing, Trent Reznor composing, David Fincher in the director’s chair: despite being no particular fan of any one of those guys individually, I couldn’t fight back curiosity about what they put together. The film turns out to be as enjoyable as it is obscurely oppressive, giving the story a surprisingly dark, driving feel — Fincher’s hand, I assume — and high-glossing it with countless small visual effects. It features the highest volume of what I assume to be CGI focal trickery that I’ve ever seen in a much-discussed regatta sequence, which, alas, winds up being as cinematic as the picture gets, but that’s still probably more cinematic than most films in major U.S. release right now.

All the cooks do their damndest to flavor this broth, but I can’t help tasting a certain thinness. One clue to the problem comes in a quote from Gawker CEO Nick Denton, talking about Zuckerberg in the New Yorker: “Apparently, his original idea for Facebook was this dark Facebook. Like, the idea was that it was going to be a place for people to bitch about each other, and then it evolved. It was interesting how agnostic he was about which approach to take.” In that agnosticism lies the reason I can’t summon much interest in Zuckerberg’s accomplishments. He seems to have — indeed, The Social Network depicts him as having — ultimately just cranked away at the puzzle of figuring out what the greatest number of other people would flock to. Neither real life nor this movie offers any evidence that he’s especially, personally into what Facebook is. I don’t consider premising a movie on this a bad idea in itself — subject matter usually doesn’t — but this one feels as if it’s always insisting upon the inherent interestingness of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation of Facebook. I don’t buy it.

 

Nicholson Primer

Act now and you can be the first to comment on my primer on the novels of Nicholson Baker, published today on The Millions:

If you don’t know Nicholson Baker as an intensive describer of everyday minutiae, surely you know him as an intensive describer of goofy sexual fantasy. At the very least, you might hold the broad notion that he’s very, very detail-oriented. None of those images capture the novelist in full, but if you twist them into a feedback loop by their common roots, you’ll get closer to the reality. Whatever the themes at hand, Baker adheres with utter faith to his narrators’ internal monologues, carefully following every turn, loop, and kink (as it were) in their trains of thought. He understands how often people think about sex, but he also understands that, often times, they just think about shoelaces — and he understands those thoughts of sex and shoelaces aren’t as far apart, in form or in content, as they might at first seem.

This is why some find Baker’s novels uniquely dull, irritating, or repulsive, and why others place them in the small league of books that make sense. Not “sense” in that they comprise understandable sentences, paragraphs, and chapters; the existential kind of sense. So many novels exude indifference to their medium, as though they could just as easily have been — or are merely slouching around before being turned into — movies, comics, or interpretive dances. The Baker novel is long-form text on the page as well, but it’s also long-form text at its core, and on every level in between. Adapting it into anything else would be a ludicrous project at best and an inconceivable one at worst; you might as well “adapt” a boat into a goat.

After you’ve read the whole thing, feel free to enter the month-long grip of anticipation for my Jean-Philippe Toussaint primer.

Rehumanized

The Humanists, my monthly film column at 3Quarksdaily, returns this week with a piece on Sangsoo Hong’s Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors:

“Art is the concealment of art,” someone once said. Though sources conflict about exactly who that was, his words must have reached Sangsoo Hong, who toils to produce films that look and feel like nothing at all. This is a canny strategy to raise cinephiles’ eyebrows: plain people doing plain things, plainly portrayed? Then there must be something big and complex grinding away beneath the surface. While this way of thinking often leads straight to a dead end, the wall against which earnest film students beat their heads until their grad school fund runs dry, it pays off when applied to Hong, the most distinctive filmmaker to emerge out of South Korea’s cinematic boom of fifteen years and counting.

The Hong movie, of which ten specimens with a strong family resemblance now exist, is both a hard sell and an easy one. Spartanly unadorned, it’s built out of long, often unmoving shots of decidedly un-epic subjects. Its large stable of floundering creative types — writers, composers, filmmakers — pass the time hanging out in pubs, taking car and train trips, pounding bottle after bottle of liquor, stumbling into wanly unappealing sexual encounters, and blearily, unconvincingly, insisting upon their worthiness as artists, as lovers, as human beings. Their conversations are as outwardly inane as anything overheard on public transit or in hotel lobbies around the world. Despite the small scale of their problems, solutions refuse to budge from the hazy distance.

Yet it can all be so relatable. Though subject to a wide range of cultural and temperamental oddities — about which more later — Hong’s flighty monuments to frustration endure, in some sense, the same problems we all do. They want to stake out recognizable individualities, to do work that will make a mark on the cultural world, and to hook up with the men or women they’re particularly into — to connect, in various senses. But these broad desires are also vague, and they’re easily overwhelmed by the detritus of the moment. In Hong’s world, this detritus manifests as an endless stream of cigarettes, bottles of soju, chintz in all its forms, and sudden opportunities for sexual congress.

But do check it out in full. I don’t know whether it’s the highly concentrated dosages of Anthony Lane with which I’ve lately been injecting myself or the film critics I’ve been interviewing for The Marketplace of Ideas, but my interest in film criticism has been fired up lately. Maybe I just need a form to quixotically attempt revitalizing.

A map of Couplândia

The latest chapter of my 101 Contemporary Novelists Without Whom Your Brain Might Well Shrivel and Die is up today at The Millions. It’s about Douglas Coupland:

“I’m not saying that the bulk of novels out there aren’t art — they are — they’re just not modern art.”

Douglas Coupland, “Why Write Modern Fiction?”

How ironic that Douglas Coupland, the man who popularized the term “Generation X”, turns out to be one of the least ironic novelists of his generation. His novels may, on the whole, be loaded with typographical trickery, brand names of the nanosecond, slacking youngsters, and Simpsons references, but he’s also deep into a suite of timelessly, radically un-hip novelistic themes. At the lightest readerly touch, Coupland’s smirking surfaces and visual bravado give way to a landslide of questions and concerns about, as Andrew Tate put it in his book-length study of Coupland’s writing, “conviction, community, connection, and continuity.”

Take Coupland’s work as a whole and his strengths become starkly apparent. He’s especially good when writing in the voice of an actual character, not a neutral, disembodied narrator. (He’s even better when writing as several of them.) Often criticized for peppering his texts with marketing detritus forgotten or best forgotten — Tae Bo, Gap, Pets.com — he deals with the timeless human problems best when discussing them in parallel with things so disposable. His penchant for suddenly dropping protagonists into bizarre scenarios also draws reviewer heat, but when he successfully mixes the very bizarre and the very mundane, there’s nothing quite like it in literature. He’ll often steer away from the norms of plotting and typesetting tradition, and when he does, the harder he cranks the wheel, the better.

Consider yourself linked not once, but twice.

Personality

Andrew O’Hehir recently helpfully suggested that film critics cease their insistent death rattles and get on with the business of, y’know, writing about movies. (To wit: “I will offer some unsolicited advice to my fellow critics all around the world: Shut up. Shut up now. Shut the fuck up and get back to work.”) Later in the piece, he says something even more important to critics and immensely relevant to writers of any kind: “Film criticism is a kind of performance, an adjunct form of entertainment. If it isn't funny and lively and engaging, it isn't anything at all.”

I would submit that O’Hehir’s words are true for 90 percent of the words one might string together in a career: if it ain’t funny, lively, and engaging, it ain’t dick. In film criticism specifically, all the erudition and well-developed theory in the world won’t save you from irrelevance if you forget that your principal task is simply to write well. Or, a O’Hehir puts it, “Reviewing movies is a lot more like performing stand-up comedy than like delivering a philosophy lecture. None of those grand ideas even begin to matter if you're boring and you can't write.”

I loved that my interview last week with Battleship Pretension hosts Tyler Smith and David Bax [transcript] turned into a pretty respectably in-depth discussion of criticism itself. I asked them what, in an environment crammed full of film bloggers, film podcasters, and plain old film reviewers, they listen for most in voices discussing cinema. It seemed to come down to not necessarily knowledge, not necessarily intellectual acumen, but personality.

Then it dawned on me: of course — that’s why I listen to their show too! That’s why I listen to all the podcasters and broadcasters I listen to. That’s why I read all the writers and bloggers I read. That’s, in a less direct but no less valid way, why I watch the filmmakers I watch. (It’d be true for vloggers too, if I ever watched vlogs.) I won’t go so far as to say that personality is all, but it now seems obvious to me that, without personality, nothing else — however much you have of it — matters.

Naturally, I make such a big deal of this because I so often fail at having a personality myself. That’s not to say that I don’t possess one — though the matter remains up for debate — but that I don’t convey one. I might have picked up that ill-serving habit through commercial radio announcing, which is all about getting in, maintaining a tone, reading song titles off the monitor, and getting out. You’ll notice commercial radio isn’t a particularly booming industry these days.

Whenever one quashes their own personality in the sort of media that needs it most, I tend to suspect, as Tyler Smith said in our interview, that they want desperately to sound like they know what they’re talking about. We all run this risk from time to time. The probable consequence is a reaction from the audience much the same as the one Smith described himself as having to most other film podcasts: “Wow! You've managed to bore me about the subject I love most. That's really quite a feat!”

Ultimately, I’ve never thought to myself, “Wow, this guy knows so much!” and then become a dedicated fan. I have thought, “Wow, this guy’s so engaging!”, and dedicated fandom followed. Indeed, most of my favorite people to read, watch, hear, etc. probably know far less about the subjects that most interest me than I do. Maybe that’s all that needs to be said on this subject.

The Ballad of David Markson

Published today at The Millions, my fourth and latest contemporary novelist primer, this time on the late David Markson:

I laughed loud and long after coming across a retired schoolteacher’s self-published book of poetry with the wildly unappealing title Meanderings of an Aged Mind. Yet it now occurs to me that the late avant-garde novelist David Markson’s literary output eventually assumed exactly that form. And though he never quite reached the depth of being forced into self-publication, his fame seems to have peaked around 1970. Quasi-praise such as  “undeserved obscurity” and “smartest novelist you’ve never heard of” would thereafter accumulate like barnacles on his hull.

Markson wrote two novels that look just about like traditional novels, one that could pass for a traditional novel’s second cousin, and four that invent, develop, and refine the aggressively non-novelistic shape that would become his very own genre. Line them up, and you’ve never seen such clear stylistic progress. Final destination: books made of evenly-spaced, meticulously arranged facts from the lives of notable artists, writers, philosophers, and other intellectuals. No, not historical fiction. Not narratives of any lives in particular. Not tracings of any currents of thought. Just textual accretions, really, but textual accretions of the highest erudition and artistry.

If you’re looking for grand statements about David Markson’s career, you might say the same thing that makes his novels so fascinating — and, to his fans, so endlessly engaging — also makes them so little-known. Not just steeped in but crafted from the West’s achievements in thought and aesthetics, they pay off in excitement to the extent that you know your Yeatses from your Keatses, your Kierkegaards from your Spinozas. Truly meriting the label of sui generis that otherwise gets thrown around so carelessly, his novels are fiendishly tricky to contextualize. What might you have already read that suggests you’ll like David Markson? Tough call, since, for good or ill, nothing’s like David Markson.

But the whole thing, people, the whole thing.

What's my plan with these primers, you ask? To eventually build up enough to make a book. Something along the lines of 101 Contemporary Novelists Without Whom Your Brain May Well Wither and Die. Sure, I don't have an agent, and sure, I have no idea who's in the game of publishing that sort of book, but hope springs eternal. Any reactions to that plan, dear readers? Better yet, any suggestions about which novelists you're dying to see primer'd next? (The more impudently they abandon the legacy of those 19th-century plot monsters, the better.)