Full of admiration, this I is, for people with firm opinions, especially aesthetic judgements, their confidence, the way they take ownership of their opinions saying x is the best short story writer or y is the best Impressionist or z is the best post-punk album. But I can’t do that. Or rather I can’t find the I behind the opinion, the I that’s supposed to be having these considered, informed opinions, because I think about the writers I’ve liked over the years and see nothing but chance, arbitrary chance, that little Nazi Marty Heidegger’s thrownness, alley-oop, our opinions nothing more than an agglutination of biases formed by influences we had no control over, our parentsteachersgeneticscultureshistoricalmomentsbiologiesreligionsracesclasseslanguages, the way this all has shaped us, cookie cutters carving so much soft dough.
Case in point: Kerouac. I don’t like him now, haven’t read him in a long time, but when I was 17, he was everything. Was this because I thought he was a good writer (however I defined this then or rather however the world I was thrown into conditioned me to define this) or because I liked jazz (because my parents liked jazz and because that Ken Burns documentary made me cry or did I cry because my grandmother was sick or because the girl I liked refused to notice me in social studies?) or because I was a teenager and wanted to ditch school, ditch life, and dharma bum around the country (though this restlessness too wasn’t mine but a product of puberty or disgust with my parents’ boomer consumerism or a predictable reaction to the confines of the American suburb or…).
So I see people with their opinions, churning out listicles of best postmodern novels or writing witty takedowns of the latest Sally Rooney sensation and I don’t agree or disagree so much as feel lost, envious of their unified sense of self—I don’t want to say simple or naïve even though I feel that maybe, or one segment of my I, the I that is my father’s arrogance, passed down, unavoidable, exhausting—the way they act as if they had the opinion and not that the opinion was had for them by the world they were formed by and in.
Does anyone actually believe Woolf is better than Joyce or minimalism is more important than maximalism or films are more relevant than novels? Is Hemingway better than Fitzgerald or are they both equally amazing or equally shit and is this opinion objectively true for everyone, across times and cultures? Is this opinion-haver standing outside it all, tapping into the opinion-in-itself, and bringing back that information to educate the thrown masses hurtling ignorantly through space? How do they tell themselves this? Is it a performance? Feigned certainty as the first step to developing a static, stable sense of free will, sense of self, and then branding that self, marketing it, shouting it from the rooftops in a loop of reinforcing selfness…
Ok. Here goes. My favorite writer, the most relevant, innovative, risk-taking, mold-breaking, sui generis writer of this contemporary moment that I’m dying to recommend to you all, that you all must read, each and every discrete reader out there (and the numerous selves they each house), if you want to be intelligent, well-read, respectable poet-citizens in this 21st century, bear with me, I’m getting there, this writer that I love (there I go again with that fraudulent I, who is it? This I spies Mrs. Menery’s opinions creeping in now, its fifth-grade teacher spouting Strunk and White and swelling into view is its parents’ bookshelf, the contents a lasting, random legacy, and what is love? Do I—whoever this I is at this moment, this very moment here, let’s keep it simple—have the same idea of love, what it means to love a book, a sentence, an idea? Is it to be gripped or affected or charmed or transported or informed or immersed or challenged? What’s a book? A manifesto? Bound consciousness? A story? An idea container? An empathy instructor? An arc of catharsis? A friend? Do we read them to understand ourselves or others or the world or to revel in the impossibility of understanding or to kill an hour in the airport or…).
I—I—I need to stay focused here. To stay I. Keep an eye on my goal but is the goal mine, the eye, mine, the my, mine? Or…
Fuck it.
I, no, we—the heterogenous and mutable things hurtling through this incomprehensible world with the insane audacity to call themselves us—we’ll just watch tv.
Jon Doughboy is a lowly clerk at Bartleby & Co. Prefer not to with him @doughboywrites.
minor literature[s] 