Saturday, January 10, 2009

Eggers' Puppet Empire

SOMEDAY I want to do a report for this blog on the vast marionette empire ruled by The Dave. Anyone who examines American literature today runs into his delusionary flunkies everyplace-- brainwashed acolytes goose-stepping in their metaphorical uniforms across the literary landscape.

At the top of it all stands the Dictator, whose every gesture from his San Francisco fortress sends followers into paroxyms of emotion and screams. "Seig Heil! Seig Heil!" They give him unquestioning obedience. He's surrounded himself with the biggest collection of crackpots seen since the Third Reich. Creepy children's author Daniel Handler certainly is one of the most fanatical, a loyally subservient dog eager to destroy his scant integrity in service to his master. The women of the Eggers Reich, Vendela Vida and Heidi Julavits, severe creatures with pulled-back hair and purple lipstick, are no less fanatical. Beneath this layer is a conglomeration of stooges, sycophants, and marginally coherent psychopaths, from cryptopuppet plagiarist Tom Bissell to plagiarism apologists Roger Hodge and Jon Lethem, mad scientist George Saunders, insane idiot John Hodgman, groveling uberfan Matthias Schwartz, and the rest of the jumbled postmodern menagerie. Someone like Rick Moody is more-or-less a propped-up equal, Duce to Dave's Fuehrer, wearing a brighter uniform with more phony medals and shiny buttons on the front but less substance inside it.

1 comment:

King Wenclas said...

"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."
-Walter Scott
**************
The Eggers Gang has practiced a lot of deception, which did greatly weaken the literary rebellion-- but the jigsaw pieces are beginning to fall into place.
Amazing to me is the way esteemed writers like Handler and Bissell could turn themselves into rank apologists, and fulfill so assiduously the Eggers "directive" as predicted in the John Homans 2002 article.
Interesting story, by the way, in the current Harpers by Heidi Julavits.
As confused as the story is, in typical pomo fashion, one can take an interesting meaning from it, starting with the curious Cincinnati setting. . . .
(There's a lot of dots to connect if one cares to-- for the puzzle solvers in this audience.)