Literary Lazarus: The Standard Shit They Suggest You Read and the Superior Shit You Should Read Instead

Lazarus being resurrected by the son of God, only after God himself had just finished killing him.

            I don’t think I’m telling any tales out of school when I say that in this modern epoch, the interest in literature, and reading in general, is diminishing.  (I don’t think many people are making it out of school either.)  The purpose of this article is not for me to erupt in a cacophonous and uncoordinated emotional diatribe about my exasperation in regards to intellectual atrophy.  That wouldn’t be very productive.

            This blog is about the human body; every aspect of it.  What is more conspicuous in regards to human identity, thought, and action than the mind?  Beastio Theorio is just as disappointed when you allow your sinews to wither as when you allow your mind.  But where has the burgeoning desire to acquire knowledge gone?  We’ve all heard stories of past generations, prohibited from learning due to race, gender, or status, gambling their lives in order to read a book.  Why aren’t books such a commodity any longer?  The opus of literature available is now commodious and easily accessible.  Why is it squandered?  Yes, we are now inundated with a plethora of options which can steal our interest.  Maybe we have different knowledge now.  Maybe our brains are turning into a formless gruel.  There’s no sense in pessimistically hypothesizing about that.

If we don't read, what are they supposed to eat?

    

            There’s only one thing I’m sure of and can take palpable action against.  The literary canon has been established and is immutable according to the ivorytower literati.  The education system has decided upon a most innocuous and insipid anthology which they continually offer the children.  Well, they need to take notice that what they are offering is being rejected and the generation is developing bibliophilia.  Maybe instead of Author A, it’s time to offer Author B.  It is no longer time to play safe.  Literature needs to stop acting like a timorous eunuch and start twisting some testicles.  So now here’s a list of necessary author swaps.

Stop Reading:  David Foster Wallace

            When modernism went out of style, along with it went literary depth, craft, emotion, and overall brilliance.  The ushering in of post-modernism brought along a cluttered, superficial, mechanical style which provided contrived pastiche and nebulous bullshit.  Post-modernism is the cliché literature which puts a foul taste into the common man’s mouth; it is which sparks comments such as “What is this…I don’t even…” or “This is pretentious” or “None of this makes sense or matters.”  And I don’t castigate these comments.  Modernism dealt with true, worldly problems; it was an artistic attempt to find truth, identity, quell fears, make advances.  Post-modernism is what separated the writer from society.  Post-modernism is what made writing recondite.  Post-modernism is what is responsible for literature stimulating the bitter buds of our minds rather than the sweet.  Fuck post-modernism.

            Why David Wallace?  He is the embodiment of what I’ve listed above.  He is the post-modern don.  His novel/opus of mental diarrhea, Infinite Jest, is the leading doctrine of these self-appraising ninnies.  Infinite Jest is 1,000+ pages of literary masturbation, surfeit with deadlanguage, inane allusions, flat characters, and social issues dealt with so softly, you feel like you’re betwixt a pillow fight. 

            Let this failed experiment with literature die.  Ignore it as you would ignore a boisterous brat pining for attention.  Let it die and let true art rise.

I can only assume that he is on trial for the murder of literature

Start Reading:  Thomas Wolfe

            You know, I could have very easily written James Joyce.  Where Wallace’s prolix Infinite Jest is 1,000 pages about nothing, Joyce’s works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, are 1,000 pages which encompass everything.  Alas, my favoritism of Joyce is well-documented, so I’ll give another epic writer a chance.

            You want thick, turgid books filled with sprawling, wild, poetic sentences which run through the pages like waking vines?  As a young, aspiring writer, Thomas Wolfe’s editor instructed him to write a novel.  Three months later, Wolfe plopped a 3,000 page manuscript on his editor’s desk.

The only English word he didn't know was "editing."

 

            Yes, Wolfe was a wild man.  His prose was unrelenting and unraveled with an impetuous rhapsody.  He only wrote four novels, but those four novels can demand a lifetime to fully digest.  Wolfe wrote with brutal veracity in hopes of creating the truest fiction possible.  Upon release of his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe became a virtual exile from his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, and ironically could not look homeward again.  The citizens were outraged that they were so accurately in a work of literature.  Truth hurts, I suppose.

Stop Reading:  Fifty Shades of Grey

            Gustave Flaubert predicted the denigration of literature into a grey, romanticized mush with his 1856 novel, Madame Bovary.  In Flaubert’s work, Madame Bovary becomes so deeply immersed in the delusions of romance novels that she becomes disjointed from reality and faces her demise.

            Listen, I don’t want to spend too much talking about a work which is utterly impertinent to the medium of literature.  The reason this doesn’t qualify as literature is the same reason pornographic films don’t win Oscars.  Do I have anything against pornography?  Of course not; it’s just that when a piece becomes entirely fixated in exploiting one primal aspect of man and neglects the artistic technicalities, it deserves to be compartmentalized as a niche work.

The movie version is just a sex tape.

Start Reading:  D.H Lawrence

            Nearly one hundred years ago, D.H Lawrence was busy beginning “the sexual revolution.”  His controversial novels were frequently challenged by the courts for their vulgar language, ribald, and lascivious subject matter.  Where today’s grocery literature is ravishing the right to speak freely, Lawrence treated it as a privilege. 

Perhaps his most controversial work is Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  If the reader wants the visceral content of sex, love, and affairs, it is all present.  The only difference is that the language and imagery is created by a master poet, augmenting upon the sensory aspect of the novel.  And Lawrence doesn’t stop at matters of flesh; he seeks to vivisect the symbiotic relationship between mind and body.  I suppose he was a reader of Beastio Theorio. 

The smartest man to offer free mustache rides

Stop Reading:  Charles Bukowski

            Okay, okay, I already hear the snarls and sniping of angered men and women in flip-flops, stained shirts, mussed hair, reading this blog with a hangover from cheap five dollar wine.  You see that sentence I just wrote?  That alone should make you a scholar on most of Charles Bukowski’s work.

Fuck your stupid French talk show

            Listen, I can look over to my bookshelf at this moment and count 22 Bukowski books.  I have been a teenager who enjoys reading.  I am not (nor can I) denying that at one point, Charles Bukowski was a major author in my personal literary cannon.  But with age comes a natural growth.  Yes, there is some refreshing grit, abandon, and humor to be found in Bukowski’s works.  But you begin to realize just why he so frequently mentions the works of other writers.  Charles Bukowski is no more than a collage of traits which he purloined from other literary greats.  The humor he took from Thurber, the grotesqueness from Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine, the sexuality from D.H, the psychological torment from Dostoevsky, the emotional outpouring from the Spanish poets, the brevity from Papa Hemingway.  But there is a singular author which he cites as his personal favorite from which his mimesis of style is most evident.

Bukowski discovers the internet; no longer sees the need for women.

Start Reading: John Fante

            Or Bante as Bukowski constantly refers to him.  John Fante was a tough, young man writing gritty, unadulterated prose about life on the streets of Los Angeles.  And he was doing this before Bukowski even arrived on the scene and adopted the same shtick.

I'm pretty sure Bukowski has that exact same outfit.  And that exact same cat, too.

            Fante’s short story collection, The Big Hunger, deals so thoroughly with the topics of youth, attraction, poverty, the city, and writing that virtually all of Bukowski’s redundant work is made defunct.   

            However, by far his most famous work is the novel Ask the Dust.  Undoubtedly one of my favorite works, Ask the Dust performs the bildungsroman archetype of poor, young writer in the city falls in love with a girl to perfection.  Something Bukowski toiled with for years but without Fante’s precision and execution. 

Salma Hayek, because she starred in the film version of Ask the Dust.  Yeah, that's why.

Stop Reading:  Jane Austen or any of the inexorable supply of Bronte sisters

            If you’ve been through academia, then you’ve been exposed to these female writers.  These women are virtually a perfunctory read at this point and that’s the issue.  Too often are these women venerated for the fact that they were women in a period in which patriarchy was far more bumptious.  And boy, do these women let the reader know of the oppressive status quo.  These gender themes are far too inundating and overwhelming; they compromise the work and prevent analysis from an objective standpoint.  At this present day, the works of these women stand as historic landmarks rather than works of high literary quality.

There they all are, conversing about periods, I'm sure.  Literary and menstrual.

Start Reading:  Carson McCullers

            It would be incredibly misogynistic of me to say that I enjoy Carson McCullers as a writer because she writes like a male.  So I won’t say that.

            In all seriousness, I believe that it is insolent that Carson McCullers does not receive a prominent role as a figurehead in female literature.  Carson McCullers had something which the aforementioned female writers did not possess: toughness.  She moved to New York City alone at the age of 17, suffered through indigence, several strokes, rheumatic fevers, two failed marriages with the same man (“Saroyan Syndrome”), and was a veritable invalid at the age of 30.  Enduring through these tragedies allowed her an exceptional ability to write a true and powerful sentence.  Gender was irrelevant in the works of McCullers; what was most salient was the manner in which she passionately depicted the plights of abject and lonely human beings. 

            The theme of sad and solitary human beings wandering and bumping into each other is most common in her works.  Her greatest work, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, begins with one the most engaging first chapters I have read; it depicts the relationship of two deaf and mute friends who have been living together for ten years beginning to strain and collapse.

            McCullers doesn’t ask for pity or contrition; she has the skills to play with the big boys, no tricks or handicap necessary.

McCullers and M. Monroe:  One of these women banged Arthur Miller, and the answer may surprise you.

            The mood has stopped striking me.  Enough writing; I would rather be reading.  But as you can see, maybe the problem is not in regards to the minds of the audience but rather the material they are offered.  I have no doubt that the literary changes I have offered would not only appease, but greater satisfy the reader. 

Illliteracy is becoming an issue.  No, not illiteracy, which is the inability to read or write.  But rather Ill-literacy, which is when the bullshit you read, makes me absolutely ill.

Salma Hayek because tits

-Sameer Saklani