Spunk & Bite Page 21

  Writers can do little about the fate of their pop references, aside from wishing that the good stay good (and healthy) and the flawed stay flawed (and healthy), thus allowing the human race to continue and the ephemeragies to retain their original sense.

  Of course, one can make some judgments when choosing references, treating gingerly those likely to die, break (e.g., steroidal athletes), transform themselves, or drop below the radar in the near future. As for the last criterion, the Web provides one clue to enduring mass appeal in its lists of top searches by millions of surfers. In 2005 one could learn (from the Lycos search engine) that each of the following pop “items” had been on the top-fifty list for at least five consecutive years: Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson, Dragonball (the anime series), WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment), and Harry Potter. Such longevity can support a choice—or its rejection in favor of fresher items: those just making the list or just starting to excite you and your particular target audience.

  Writers with an eye for the culturally excessive and absurd can do without ready-made compilations of pop phenomena. But some of these lists are of interest—first, for what they reveal about the ephemeragy of a given period; and second, as a way of studying people’s changing tastes. Esquire’s “Dubious Achievement Awards 2004” feature, for example, aims for laughs with references to Abu-Gharib prison abuses, sexual-assault charges against basketball star Kobe Bryant, allegations of child abuse made against Michael Jackson, and the torture of Guantánamo Bay prisoners using deafening blasts of Eminem and Limp Bizkit music.

  One might ask, “Must I indulge in this kind of exploitation to be punchy, engaging, and with it?” Not necessarily; trotting out the ghastly stuff is only one form of ephemeragy. In fact, among the funniest of the Esquire Awards was one of its most benign items; it references a horse (Smarty Jones) who was credited in the Philadelphia Daily News as the writer of several movie reviews. But in truth, the edgiest ephemeragy often flirts with the dark side of notoriety, either adding to that darkness or helping to purge it, depending on context and treatment.

  DUMBING DOWN OR NUMBING DOWN?

  Recently, comparing two dramatic performances, a top reviewer likened one to The Sharper Image, the other to Sephora. Have we dumbed down to this level in the art of metaphor—references to mall stores? But not so fast: It happened that the performances under review were television crime shows, in no loftier a cultural plane, really, than icons of the mall. And what’s with all this cultural hierarchy, anyway? If a figure of speech makes a connection, it makes it. Mark Leyner would certainly agree; as he remarked in an interview with Larry McCaffery (Gopher/Mondo 2000),

  I despise the contemptuous attitude so many professors seem to have . . . about television, rock and roll, and certain kinds of movies. Personally I could never see the difference between Popeye and Thackeray. . . . {M}y work presents the world the way people . . . live in it, the way we receive and perceive it.

  Perhaps the issue is not so much one of dumbing down as of numbing down. When too many pop references serve as facile substitutes for hard-wrought and more precise imagery, it begins to feel like the writer is on autopilot. In her otherwise-dead-on novel Worst Fears, Fay Weldon writes that “Vilna looked like a cross between a vulture and Ivana Trump,” banking on what to her readers is probably a vaguely intelligible and unevocative reference. What does Vilna really look like? Come on, give us those distinctive brushstrokes that lift a character off the page and into our memories.

  Poet Lisa Verigin has observed a similar effect when poets too quickly seize on pop-culture references. In “Do Elvis and Poetry Mix? Benefits and Pitfalls of Pop-Culture Poetics” (The Writer magazine), she grants that a specific pop or commercial reference might be more evocative than a generalized one—Adams clove gum versus chewing gum, for example. But she asks: Is such a reference germane? Does it enhance the surrounding content? Is the chosen reference essential, or is it interchangeable with others? Pop—especially nostalgic pop—can lead to sentimentality, she notes, too often manifesting itself in glops of predictable detail. Facile pop undercuts “the tension needed to drive a poem forward.” To delight, surprise, and enlighten, Verigin advises, limit pop allusions to those providing something more to the poem than cause for an affirming grunt.

  In prose, however, one hates to burden a pop reference with too many rhetorical and symbolic imperatives. So don’t. Just deliver it with the clarity, economy, and grace expected of all good writing. Let the item and the reader’s associations do the rest. A one-word ephemerage in novelist Richard Russo’s Empire Falls tells readers exactly what the author wanted to say: “Miles studied his father, whose stubble had a strange orange tint. ‘Your beard’s full of food. Cheetos? ’ ”

  THIRTY

  EDGE: WRITING AT THE NERVY LIMITS

  The Salon reviewer was going on about playwright Hans Ong—“youngest recipient of the MacArthur ‘genius’ grant”—and his latest work of fiction. “This novel,” she said, “confirms that his fierce, edgy prose translates beautifully to the written page.”

  Think you could you handle this praise? And I don’t mean the parts about youth, genius, or MacArthur money; who cares about that junk? I’m talking about “edgy,” the charged-up billing of the day, electric enough to put your name in lights—and prone to short circuits. Witness this slam of one journalist by another: “He’s the archetype of the phoned-in, self-satisfied, clichéd attempt at cliché-debunking that passes for edgy prose among our calcified activist class.”

  Still, from the tabloid roosts to the aeries of literary publishing, editors are flapping for edgy matter—or “edge,” as it is called. They want it in prose, they want it in poetry. Publicists and critics spritz the term around like chili sauce. Writers hearing the call or noting the impact of Quentin Tarantino films, HBO comedy, or the baddest gangsta rap have to wonder if they, too, should jump on the edge-wagon.

  Well not all at once, please! Most editors don’t expect or even want every writer to be edgy. But they need some edge to stay in the game, and a powerful dose of it can get their attention—even blast open a door closed to most newcomers. So you might well ask: Is my own work edgy? Does it need more edge? Should I focus my strengths elsewhere? And what the {edgy expletive} is edge, anyway?

  DEFINING EDGY

  Only recently have dictionaries recognized edgy as an adjective in the arts, a term meaning “bold, provocative, or unconventional.” As used by today’s editors, however, the word suggests something other than cutting-edge innovation or avant-gardism, which have more to do with intellectual than emotional thresholds. The literary sense of edgy, on the other hand, carries the full behavioral load: nervousness, anxiety, irritability, acute sensitivity. Edgy literature manifests and evokes these emotional states, but in aesthetically stimulating ways.

  How does it do so? By pushing some element—situation, event, imagery, language—to the limit, toward the precarious divide between unease and displeasure. Unease makes for intensity in art; the more the better—until it crosses the line into turnoff territory.

  Here, walking that line, is one of today’s edgier novelists describing a patient-holding area in a London hospital. Not for the squeamish:

  {In the} long, lowering, warped spine of a tunnel . . . connecting all the various organs of the hospital . . . {one feels} . . .weighed down by the . . . effluvia of the disease itself. A rambunctious river of pus and gleet and ichor; a cascade of mucus and bile and gall. An impressively engineered Victorian snotqueduct. (—Will Self, How the Dead Live)

  Maybe edge is what Aristotle meant by “catharsis,” tragedy’s purgation of pity and fear—which I never quite grasped. To characterize edge, I would use the terms nervously stimulating or irresistibly nervous-making.

  Many of today’s fine writers—among them Sandra Cisneros, Zadie Smith, and Z. Z. Packer—take their stories to nervous places without trying to make the telling itself edgy. Although their vocabularies in matters of race and sex do registe
r on the edge-o-meter, readers gasp mainly at story and character—for example, at a fed-up teacher about to run down a bunch of kids at a crossing in Packer’s “Our Lady of Peace.”

  Often it’s a writer’s mix of language, style, and other elements that achieves edge. A devious plot can push the nervous limits; so can dicey protagonists, breakneck pacing, radical points of view, and flirtation with legal and personal risk. Bad-mouth a few sacred figures or crime bosses and you’ll have edge—and maybe a horse’s head on your pillow the next morning.

  But let’s talk about the two elements of most concern to the wordmeister: language and the style of its delivery.

  * * *

  EDGE: A BRIEF HISTORY

  Edge has been around as long as storytelling; but edgy material has gone by different labels, among them possessed, fevered, and outrageous. In every literary era, someone has pushed language to its jittery edge. For fourteenth-century readers accustomed to Latin, the use of Tuscan dialect in Dante’s Inferno had to have felt edgy. Shakespeare wrote lines that made hemoglobin nervous: “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine.” (Macbeth)

  The mid-twentieth century saw the edgy darkness of science-fiction and fantasy writers, and the turmoil of the Beats and existentialists: Jack Kerouac’s breathless On the Road prose—“and me swearing at myself for all the time and the money I’d wasted, and telling myself, I wanted to go west and here I’ve been all day and into the night going up and down, north and south”—and the gnawing understatement of Albert Camus’ L’Etranger: “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.” Readers encountered the defiant edge of J. D.Salinger’s troubled teen in Catcher in the Rye: “{T}he first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born . . . and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it.”

  Sex, drugs, and violence fueled much of the edgy language of the 1960s and 1970s, when no-holds-barred writers like William Burroughs, Hunter S.Thompson, and Charles Bukowski reigned supreme. And Kathy Acker took that language to its post-punk, feminist, in-your-face extreme.

  But editors say they are wearying of shock for shock’s sake, even if media producers are not. Today’s paragons of edgy literary prose are likely to be found overseas among novelists like Will Self and Martin Amis. In Amis’s Yellow Dog, even inanimate objects shudder into nervous coexistence with his protagonists: Toenails give a “defiant tick” when lopped; fireplace logs expectorate and regurgitate. And in the air, a plane

  revealed her silver breast to the sun. As she rose, a cross-wind jolted her fiercely to starboard; a beast of the upper air had tried to seize her, and then let her slip from his grasp like a bar of soap.

  * * *

  EDGY LANGUAGE AND STYLE

  Some misconceptions surround the term edgy language, which is often confused with runaway obscenity. But foul-mouthing is just one type of edgy locution—the easiest to execute, yet, as evidenced by many a ’zine or blog, prone to being pointless and edgeless. Obscenity works best when its edge comes not from the naughtiness of the words, but, as in a David Mamet play, from the turmoil of its speakers.

  Edgy language can perhaps be thought of as “words in turmoil.” If the gross and obscene can be nerve-wrenching, so can conflicted grammar, agitated word order, strung-out usage, and psychotic metaphor. Sentences can be clipped or stretched into rhythms so manic and caffeinated they “make coffee nervous,” to paraphrase writer/director Nora Ephron.

  America’s edgy stylists include Joan Didion, with her strings of tense one-line paragraphs, and David Foster Wallace, virtuoso of the damaged-psyche perspective (“. . . something vaguely digestive about the room’s odor.” —Infinite Jest). Also in this circle is Don DeLillo—a writer, in the words of John Updike, whose “fervent intelligence and . . . fastidious, edgy prose weave halos of import around every event.” Snippets of DeLillo’s prose agitate my own notebooks. A sampling from Cosmopolis:

  The idea was to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in a whirl, in a radiant spin. . . . The technology was imminent or not. It was semi-mythical. It was the natural next step. It would never happen. It is happening now.

  Novelist Chuck Palahniuk’s fans have crowned him a prince of edge for a style that is, according to one reviewer, “equal parts potent imagery, nihilistic coolspeak, and doped-out craziness.” In his gothic thriller Diary, a woman in psychic pain narrates the tale in clipped, tormented locutions addressed to her husband, who lies comatose after a failed suicide. Her bitter, second-person narration delivers close-up images as merciless as the anatomical zooms on TV’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation:

  With your kind of coma victims, all the muscles contract. The tendons cinch in tighter and tighter. Your knees pull up to the chest. Your arms fold in, close to your gut. Your feet, the calves contract until the toes point screaming straight down, painful to even look at. . . . Just so you know how bad you look, any person in a coma longer than two weeks, doctors call this a persistent vegetative state. Your face swells and turns red. Your teeth start to drop out.

  One or two passages may not convey the edge created by language; more often the effect is cumulative. Nor does everyone agree on who or what is edgy. Like other art qualities, edge exists in the eye of the beholder. “I know it when I see it” is how a Supreme Court justice once characterized obscenity, prompting wags to conclude that obscenity is “whatever excites a judge.” And so with edge: whatever waggles one’s ganglia.

  * * *

  EDGE AND YOU

  WHAT IS EDGY WRITING?

  Prose or poetry that features nervously stimulating content, action, language, or style.

  WHO NEEDS IT?

  Readers who like the rush of brinkmanship. Editors expected to deliver edgy content. Writers attuned to the aesthetic of edge or who crave the label edgy as a means of advancing their careers.

  WHAT IS EDGY LANGUAGE?

  Not just graphic and obscene words, but language at the nervous boundaries of grammar, syntax, and usage; of taste, of familiar vocabulary, of moral and legal risk.

  HOW CAN I MAKE MY LANGUAGE MORE EDGY?

  Read some of the edgy writers mentioned in this chapter and catch the fever. Shake up sentence length and rhythm. Unleash an attitude. Push vocabulary to daredevil extremes. Startle by what isn’t said. Write neurotic passages—i.e.,unpredictable, disjointed, repetitive, contradictory, heretical, offensive, freakishly metaphoric. Then step back. Did you evoke nervousness—or merely a soul-shattering cringe?

  Keep trying. If edge came easy it would, well, lose its edge, wouldn’t it?

  * * *

  EDGE CONTROL

  Like knife throwers, we want our daggers to frame the live target, not puncture it. Or maybe graze an earlobe. The secret of writing edgy is to control what appears to be out of control. A vial of laudanum did not a Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” make; what made it—and made it edgy—was the poet steering readers through his phantasmagoria.

  Edge is best when it appears to be driven by a credible force. When obviously contrived, it can come off like scripted reality TV. But of course writing is scripted. Edge-masters create the illusion of unpredictability, as if some I don’t-know-what-I’ll-say-next madness forces their hands.

  And during the writing process, one may well not know what madness lies ahead. Artistic control comes in the editing, which

  should shape, not inhibit, any good stuff born of turmoil and a touch of lunacy.

  Some developing writers feel uncomfortable showing their edgiest sides to the world. It may seem like self-exposure, even exhibitionism; and to the extent that artists cannot separate themselves from their creations, it is in fact a little of both. But one can distance the artist-self from the non-artist self, letting the one burst out in its most unpredictable nakedness, while the other goes quietly about its business. Call it the courage to write, or a functionally split per
sonality, but this is a mind-set that writers usually develop as they write and publish—discovering that the private person remains intact. It is the mind-set that enables actors to play horrific characters, or comedians to turn themselves inside out before a live audience and be whole again in the morning.

  The edgy comic David Chappelle said this to a New York Times reporter: “I’m not trying to push people’s buttons. But at the same time . . . I don’t want to hold back. Our {modus operandi} . . . is to dance like nobody’s watching.”

  Mazurka, anyone?

  THIRTY-ONE

  PARTING WORDS:BUTTERFLIES IN THE KILLING FIELDS

  Author Martin Amis, you might guess by now, is among those who come to mind when I contemplate my Spunk & Bite Hall of Fame. And whenever Amis comes to mind, so does the cheery view of the cosmos expressed in The Information, his novel about competing writers: “{I}t would seem the universe is thirty billion light years across and every inch of it would kill us if we went there. This is the position of the universe with regard to life.”