Now I Know Which Dude Is David Shields
I hadn't really caught on to the whole David Shields thing because I always get him a little confused in my mind with Chris Hedges, who had to quit his job at the Times to be himself, and who I admire. This is only because they both have these bland guy names. (And lots of S's and H's and things.) So imagine my surprise when I read a little bit of what David Shields' project is and what he has to say and it's all pretty off-putting. Today Shields publishes a defense of his new book, Reality Hunger, which is a manifesto of some sort: he's responding to "numerous bloggers" who think he's "the anti-Christ," a controversy that didn't reach the Internet that I am on. Apparently the gripe is 1. he hates fiction (fine! Welcome to the club!) and 2. that big chunks of his books are quotations from other writers, and his point was that he "never wanted the reader to not quite able to tell who was talking-was it me or Sonny Rollins or Emerson or Nietzsche or Frank Rich or, weirdly, none of us or all of us at the same time?" Well, okay, great, fine with me, as I already read me some Kathy Acker twenty-five years ago. He sums up the objections to his work as from people who "don't genuflect at the twin altars of the novel and intellectual property." This is around the time I started to really differentiate between Chris Hedges and David Shields, because one of them is super-irritating.
i dunno, shields is pretty strident and ascetic and so on, and god knows i have higher hopes for fiction than he does, but i found the book itself to be both hugely entertaining and artistically liberating
You left out the best part!
"My literary sea was frozen, and this book was my axe.
Art, like science, progresses.
Forms evolve.
Forms are there to serve the culture, and when they die, they die for a good reason.
The novel is dead.
Long live the anti-novel, built from scraps."
Yeah, I mean I'm fine with remix culture even applied to literature, and there's a lot he can do with this premise, but holy shit he sounds like a dickhole.
haha, fair enough, but at the risk of sounding like an apologist, i have to wonder if his brand of nerdy earnestness just looks particularly stupid on the internet. i mean i'm compelled to say "reality hunger" made me feel "less alone" as a writer frustrated with the stasis of prose but that feels really lame to type out and i would expect to be ridiculed for it.
"I love literature, but I don't love stories per se. I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless. It's not clear to me what such narratives are supposedly revealing about the human condition."
Maybe he should have been an accountant?
Anyway, I'm back to re-reading the Odyssey.
Well, okay, great, fine with me, as I already read me some Kathy Acker twenty-five years ago.
Have I told you lately that I love you?
P.S. THIS IS A QUOTE THAT I QUOTED AND ALSO I RIPPED OFF A SONG.
Oh. I thought he was that mime guy. Now I learn he can't shut up.
Chris Hedges campaigned for Nader in 2008, which at the time buried the needle on my irritated-ometer. But Shields definitely has potential.
Yes, the book is excellent, though somewhat taxing to follow as each enumerated section really does not flow from the last. The observation I didn't expect is that the original passages (they do exist) are the best-written parts of the book.
Not to go there here, but his voice is made for Crap Email From A Dude.
Sorry to nitpick, but your second-to-last sentence confused me a little–it makes it sound like his opponents are the ones who refuse to genuflect. But I clicked through and he said he is being characterized by his opponents as one who refuses to genuflect. When read that way, his point, and your irritation at it (which I share), makes more sense.
I have nothing productive to add, so I will just mention that, out of context, I always confuse him with David Brooks, because I watch the Newshour too much. Although it's not exactly an unfair comparison, now that I think about it.
You're not alone. I confuse David Shields and David Brooks with Brooke Shields all the time.
I also get Mark Shields' jowls confused with sumptuous curtains sometimes and try to hide behind them, and he gets mad.
Also, just for the record: Shields is equally or perhaps even more annoying on the radio (every sentence begins with or otherwise includes "I.")
I have heard two podcast interviews with him, and, apart from a quite distinctive voice, I found him quite listenable and credible.
I read seven or eight pages of this book and was so bored I couldn't go on. Yeah, yeah, fiction is dead, don't get an MFA, blah, blah. I just can't get enamored of writers selling books bitching about writing and its trappings. And I actually quite liked his novel Dead Languages.
If his broader point is that all fiction is a distillation of broader (or narrower) experiences into a a universally emotionally (or intellectually) resonant form, then fine, I agree. But just taking broad quotes and sticking them together is both lazy and meaningless unless the quotes are so carefully cultivated and removed as to have a completely new and independent meaning, in which case the plagiarism is no more unoriginal than a kidnapping note made up of words clipped from magazines. So he's either pointlessly histrionic about relatively uninteresting points (probable), unoriginal (likely), or both.
James Wood did a nifty and compelling demolition of Reality Hunger.