the DBMB

l first of all, cheese, here's what she looks like. A bit spare and thin, with beady eyes, and a face that makes me think of razor blades. So.

Now that that's out of the way, my first reaction to cheese with a spoon's apoplectic reception to Ms. Kakutani's review was that it (MK's review) sounds like this same old DB Myers bullshit, viz. writing is on the page to do its job and only to do its job; let's leave looking beautiful to women (or vases, or perfect shadows at two in the afternoon or the like). As most of you know or can glean, I really hate the DB Myers Bullshit--which I'll acronmymize henceforth into DBMB--a school of thought that would have excoriated Joyce in his day, and does excoriate DeLillo, Proulx, and others now. (For those of you who have never been exposed to the DBMB business, you can ask Kilduff for a copy of M's wonderful essay, "A Reader's Manifesto," which was published in the Atlantic a little over a ago.) And what's the problem here, now, with writers like DeLillo and Proulx (and, one must presume, Pynchon and Roy and Nabokov)? Well, the problem is that in the "growing pretentiousness of American literary prose" the writing is on display, turning cartwheels or Triple Lindies and generally always jabbering in the background like an idiot behind the on-the-field sportscaster at a baseball game.

So then--it's the writing that's getting the way, is it? The actual prose? Yes yes, right--and you know, I've always felt that we writers should leave the job of writing to the, um, to the...painters. Yeah, yeah that's it, to the painters.

Fucking moron, and a fucking moron not just for this obvious reason (which is, admittedly, a bit specious (in that our dictate as writers does not necessarily demeand from us even mauvish prose)). No, a fucking moron because his argument is entirely predicated on the notion that the English language is not a living language, that it's rules do not change, or have not, or will not henceforth. A perfect example of this comes when he writes, "Coming from insiders to whom a term like 'fabulation' actually means something," and then blah and then blah and then blah. "[T]o whom a term like 'fabulation' means something"?? As in, then, at the very moment of his writing, unknown/unknown/2004, no new words shall ever enter the language. Not "fabulation," not "google," not "DBMB," not anything. English, to Myers, is apparently a dead language, no longer expandable. A bit like Colorado, I guess. I can only presume that the same fount that gave birth to his distaste for added words also gave birth to his anger at modern writers' penchant for coming up with new ways to describe things.

Oh, man, this DBMB really gets me going. Sorry about that.

In fact, I'm so sorry that I won't post my second reaction, which is that, given the passages she excerpts, maybe she's not way off base? I'm sorry cheese, but anyone who describes "a youthful crush as a 'storm of passion' that left 'the frail wings' of his emotions 'burned and blasted by love's relentless flame'" should maybe cut the high drama. Now that shit is purple.