The time has come for a brief survey of contemporary literature, the bit of it I can see, from my vantage point as one who does not read as much as he would like to but feels nonetheless aware. In 2010, the David Foster Wallace essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" comes to its twenty-year anniversary. In that essay, Mark Leyner, hip at the time, comes under fire, and a future movement of radically sincere writers is postulated. It is fair enough, I think, to trace a certain strain of influence, from Wallace to Dave Eggers and the McSweeney's literary journal. There is a type of short story found in McSweeney's that seems something of its trademark, a type that Wallace himself actually had published in its pages: This is the sort of story where the goal, explicitly, is to move by emoting clearly, but does so in a voice that denies much of the awareness that was what Wallace gained notoriety for. It shuns intellectual fireworks in favor of a voice that is "dumb": Many of the narrators seem actually handicapped.

In the latest issue, 33, a George Saunders story is published, "Fox 8," that seems to be the logical conclusion of this whole trend. It's a good, effective, piece of fiction. I don't wish to spoil it, so it will have to suffice to say that it is narrated by a fox, ends with a straightforward plea for humans to be nicer, and that you can pretty much discern where it's going a few paragraphs in. It's good enough to make a reader think "this is what literature is like in 2010," in a way that is actually weird and discouraging if that reader also fancies himself a writer, because of this deliberate shunning of many signifiers of intelligence that occur within the mind of the writer. There's linguistic pyrotechnics, of a sort, interesting turns of phrase, but deliberate choices have been made to limit the vocabulary used. If stories were paintings, imagine Donald Barthelme with his color palette greatly reduced.

I like this stuff pretty well. It's by no means the worst thing I am aware of.

Let me preface a discussion of the actual worst with a tangent: There's also this tendency found within McSweeney's to publish fiction written by celebrities of a certain stripe. "Hip" celebrities: In 33, it's James Franco, a few volumes back, Michael Cera. Miranda July could also be included in this category. I don't want to dismiss their endeavors out of hand. I just want to acknowledge the aura, informed by television, in a different form than Wallace talked about in 1990. These people make "indie" films that get talked about as "twee" and while there might be a certain lineage to the voice of the Saunders piece that dates back to 1980s Beat Happening records, there's also the bit of knowledge that gives permission: That of Delillo's "most photographed barn" that gets brought up in the same essay.

The actual worst would be this writer Tao Lin, whose writing style is shared by his friends, according to an ANP Quarterly interview that filled me with disgust about a year ago, and a self-promoter via the internet. If I find the "TV/indie movie celebrity" aura around McSweeney's a weird portent, imagine how I feel about people on the internet commenting on Hipster Runoff. If I find smart people writing stories in a faux-naive voice for deliberate effect to maybe be even more limiting than the limits it places on itself, extrapolate that to guess how I feel about dudes writing in the a post-concussion mild-trauma state at all times, when it's used not to move a reader towards empathy and awareness, but to communicate a bored depression to those already sympathetic.

Luckily there are plenty of other writers out there, published and unpublished, not working in these modes, inside the U.S. and out. Plus there's books written years ago that are widely available. My first concern is for how high-profile works dictate the future, in terms of their influence on young writers and publishers' abilities to market them. Maybe with Saunders at the apex and Lin as the nadir we can collectively move on. My second concern is for those who confuse the two, but that is only in the present, and time will make these distinctions evident.

JD Salinger is dead, and while I expect most news outlets to write headlines referring to him as just "Author of Catcher In The Rye," the briefest eulogy I would give him amounts to "May no one graffiti 'fuck you' on his tombstone."

There's a certain self-conscious backlash around that book, one cited by too many folks that don't seem like big readers as a favorite. Yet that self-consciousness leads to citing other books- Franny And Zooey, Nine Stories- as being better, but remember what got these people interested enough to read those later works in the first place. The Catcher In The Rye is uniquely strong piece of high-school assigned reading, in that it's one of the few works of literature that an adolescent can understand. In college, I heard people on the bus talking about Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, as a book they were rereading and getting a lot more out of from an older vantage point.

The impact that book made at the time of its release was deeply powerful, cited as part of an epiphany by Bruce Jay Friedman. The voice of the novel was inspiring in its immediacy, to the people of the 1950s. That "I can do this" realization is attributable to any number of works of art of the twentieth century, but it seems like the best idea-virus we could ever hope to spread, an inspiration to the spirit in the face of adversity. Friedman went on to become a novelist, as well as editing an anthology called "Black Humor" that contained within its pages some of the most interesting folks in mid-twentieth-century fiction, the folks that would midwife postmodernism in literature. This is almost a tangential connection, but it's worth noting the way the writers would all move in different directions to the point where the idea of an anthology containing them all could not effectively be said to document a movement of any kind.

Think, then, of the way Salinger's vision developed, away from the angst of young people, and into this kind of mystic spiritual searching. Buddhism, meditation- these were not popular subjects in 1950s literature. There is a documentary about the beat movement where the person who introduced the beats to these ideas was a 17-year-old girl named Hope, who ended up undergoing electroshock therapy. Here it is, in The New Yorker, in a Jewish sophisticate intellectual milieu. It seems to make sense now, but this can't be the case historically: In all likelihood it's with Salinger that these ideas start to proliferate.

With Salinger we find a major force for mind-expansion, not in a sixties drug culture way, but for general spiritual inquest and expression of contemporary voice. Later, in the 1990s, there'd be a zine called Bananafish, edited by one Seymour Glass, which would document the noise underground which has come to be a major influence on contemporary art, exciting people with the same appeal of freedom.

That's all with only four books in print. They ended up popular enough to be issued as pocket paperbacks, priced to move around six dollars, approximately the size and cost of the sort of cassette tape one could order through the mail after reading about it in an issue of Bananafish. He's dead at 91 years old, and would that I could live on so long.

Noel Freibert gave me a copy of his latest comic, "My Best Pet," and I asked him if he wanted me to review it. He was noncommittal, and I said that I can only write about things that haven't had much said about them. While I've only seen one review of the comic, that review set off a big back-and-forth between critic and artist, where Noel explicitly stated his aims. Luckily, there's some things that went unsaid, which is great, because maybe my writing about this will get more people to give me comics for free. This is to be a positive review, absolutely tainted.

Anyway, Noel's comic is one of the first "actual comics" he's done. The work he's done in the past I'll characterize as "artist's books" for the sake of distinction: Fully silk-screened books, lots of layers- some of it is almost storybook format, but pretty heavily formal in its use of colors on top of each other. His mini "The Blue Hand" is an example of this: It's all a hand shape and some text, using various masking effects. He's a pretty good silkscreener, as the three-color cover shows. There's a distinct 1990s Providence influence in how the colors play against each other in a way designed to avoid "paint by numbers" effects- the use of one color as a fill for another's line is deliberately avoided. It looks good. Here, the interiors are in black and white- as they were with his comic in Closed Caption Comics 8, with which this forms two parts of a trilogy. These are straight-forward comics, playing by the rules, using a six-panel grid. Without the multiple colors, the line drawing is pretty simple- there's no blacks, the line never wavers from a default that looks like it could be done in a ballpoint pen. (The exception being a shadowy figure on the first page and a slightly thicker line used for one character's word balloons in one all-dialogue sequence.) It's a pretty effective horror comic- EC is the reference point but the plotting is driven by dream logic more than a sense of ironic cosmic justice. This makes it disturbing beyond the "shock" animal cruelty violence that led to criticism. Despite all the exposition, the actual cause behind the events depicted is unexplained, attributable to just a pervasive evil, that exists outside the comic's basement purview.

Lane Milburn's side, "Feeble-Minded Funnies" does the same thing that annoyed me in his contribution to Closed Caption Comics 8: Being the most on-the-nose thing fucking EVER. In CCC 8, some orc-monsters in a ruined world find the miniatures used to role-play with and talk about their significance. Here, a creature called Pukeball tries to get people to read his art comics. It's pretty stupid, a gloss of commentary on Mat Brinkman comics to make it obvious. There's a Chris Cornwell comic that did the same thing and was similarly a bummer for me. We get it. Anyone who would read these comics doesn't need them. They're written for an imaginary audience that needed the existence of Multi-Force explained to them by something not as well done. The other comic here depicts basic human urges as monsters fighting. It's the same thing, basically: The self-explanatory explained. He either needs better concepts or more faith in art for art's sake, because this particular vein is very much the sort of comic you'd imagine an art student making. (On the blog there's pages of comics thrown out and abandoned, and it really wouldn't surprise me if that stuff was better but he just thought that these comics were "smarter," somehow, than that stuff.) It also reads, ironically, like the work done by a dude whose only interests are in comics and monsters and things like that, and this is him trying to justify that interest. I do congratulate him on his winning a Xeric grant and hope that the resulting published work is less self-conscious.

RIP Art Clokey, creator of Gumby.

Today David Mazzuchelli's Asterios Polyp showed up at the Baltimore Public Library and I was able to read it. Normally I try to avoid writing about things other people have already discussed at length, and that book's been talked over by pretty much everyone except for the artist himself. It's incredible for its control over various drawing styles and color use. Of all the masterpieces of graphic novels of the past decade, this is the book that is probably the best-looking, all the way through, in its sense of design. It's also the most thematically thought-through. I could run through it all right now. It's all been discussed, and it's pretty much all readily apparent when you read the thing. It's an approachable comic, if you're keyed into its concerns of art-making. It's a very "comics" comic, in terms of how important it is that you read it visually, but there's enough indicators in the actual prose on page to make it clear that's how it's supposed to be to those not necessarily initiated, like mainstream literary critics. It's a game-changer, a standards-raiser for American comics, to be certain. I look forward to seeing it be processed and moved past by others. It's moving and charming in the midst of all else. It's not pretentious, I don't think, despite the way all it's themes are mirrored and repeated on so many levels- I think the word people are looking for is "baroque."

On the opposite side of the spectrum is Shaky Kane's A-Men, the single issue collecting work from Deadline magazine which showed up at Atomic Books a few days ago. This comic is super-dense with references, but they're never explained as such, and there is none of the thought-out doubling found in Mazzuchelli- instead, it's this intuitive procession of free-association, that's not "moving" so much as it is "interesting" as a document of an artist expelling things from his mind. Like, the comic is called "A-Men" as a riff on religion and superhero comics, and while the whole thing is drawn in a Jack Kirby style the actual comic most evoked is Judge Dredd. It's about religion as fascism in some kind of British sense. There are all sorts of other references that aren't as important to "decoding meaning" so much as enforcing what's there. The plotting is super non-linear, and the conclusion anti-climactic. Plus there's two one-page things about Elvis thrown in, and other separate pages with their own various design approaches. I liked it, it's well-drawn and bonkers in the comic book format I respond favorably to. It's inarticulate in a way that seems like it corresponds to the amount of vision at hand. It's not a thing to be "processed" and then built on, the way I read modern comics, it's a weird early nineties cul de sac of cultural processing as an end in itself, it's own meager reward.

If you, like me, saw that Art Clokey had died and thought about Paper Rad, then I guess you understand appropriation as a means of understanding. That lesson is based on the symbols being dealt with- that's why there isn't "continuity" between Shaky Kane and Ben Jones. These are people who don't make work as a closed-circuit, they're dealing in a bigger pond, and ponds are not a stream flowing through time the way that influence works. Imagine reading that strip from Kramers Ergot 6 about Seinfeld and Smog in 2027, trying to know the foreign tongue of the past. This could be why Ben Jones is describing his new work in the context of Yuichi Yokoyama. Of course, Ben's more influential than Shaky Kane ever was. It's 2010 and the future is hard to understand, with our best chance at knowing the present being to think of it as a sum of the past's collection of dead-end narratives.

I have largely disavowed the practice of personal writing on the internet. So it will have to suffice to say that I had a great 2009. Too much talk of it would seem like bragging, or name-dropping, or some sort of disagreeable practice. But I had a great year, despite the lack of much of the media consumption that drives both this blog and my own conception of my life. The last year was a good one for living. If anyone reading this was around me personally during the span of that year, thank you. Those were good times.

The year is becoming unwound, and so it becomes incumbent to find a thread that went throughout the whole thing. Normally I try to couch such year-in-reviews in the context of pop culture released within the year itself, but this wasn't the best year for new work, at least of the sort I'm interested in. Most things I got excited about this year came from years prior, but the people who brought this work to my attention were productive and interesting to pay attention to.

For instance, Matthew Thurber released a cassette tape with two Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 songs on one side around the same time as Douglas Wolk posted a best-of mix on Matthew Perpetua's Tumblr account. "Noble Experiment," the final track off Strangers From The Universe ended up being sent to a great number of friends, and the Every Day/Fistful Of Dollars single is noteworthy as well. Gorgeous compositions, fast-moving, good lyrics. Later this year, Vice did a "1994" issue, where Andrew Earles called them the best band of that particular year. That issue was drowning in a retarded irony, but consider the superiority of this band to what is normally extolled by that magazine, and realize that the few songs off Mother Of All Saints that are actual songs blow it all away.

The out-of-print single I've been thinking about the past couple of days is Smog's A Hit/Wine Stained Lips 7". I think I'd heard A Hit before, on a listen to Accumulation: None, but I am bored enough by that record on the whole to have not really remembered it. The single is from the era of early Smog, dissonance to an effect of sadness and rage. When I had a roommate who would punch holes and throw records at the wall, he said that Bill Callahan was his favorite song-writer. I really enjoyed living with that guy. "Ex-Con," off the later Red Apple Falls, is a lot happier musically but still as good an example as any as to why Bill Callahan could find purchase with people like us.

Matthew Thurber made some good comics this year, to be certain. And I've written about them already. But, in a panel discussion, Jessica Abel brought up a similarity between Thurber's work and that of Jon Lewis. I tracked down the three existing issues of his Ghost Ship, from 1996, and they're great comics.

Thurber's remark was that Lewis was, like him, a big Sun City Girls fan, and it's worth noting that their Horse Cock Phepner is incredible. It's got all the denseness of writing that I appreciate about Charles Gocher, but in a pretty straight-forward rock and roll context. The way the sarcastic singing on a thing like their cover of "CIA Man" still allows room for thrilling harmonies, all while outlining conspiracy theories- A fine record.

In some ways, the Sun City Girls' combination of the esoteric and lowbrow comedy (and disinterest in questions of "morality" in pursuit of a seemingly spiritually gnostic reward) is analogous to the PFFR dudes, whose Final Flesh was the most conceptually exciting thing I heard about this year. It didn't quite live up to expectations, but "expectations" aren't really the point with a thing like that- It put forward a vision people are going to try to rip off and then fail to do so, if the rest of PFFR's work is any precedent.

Mississippi Records reissued a Dog Faced Hermans record, which was pretty charming, and Douglas Wolk wrote a Trouser Press entry that led me to listening to their later Those Deep Buds. My friends in Portland, Kill Rock Stars, reissued the first Raincoats record- roughly comparable to Dog Faced Hermans in certain ways. And sure, Odyshape is the better, weirder, album, but still this stands as a notable deed in a dull year. But what records: The Dog Faced Hermans are anarcho-punks who, by a certain point, incorporated enough of folk music to no longer be irritating.

Wolk is also a champion of Peter Blegvad's The Book of Leviathan, which is one of the finest purchases I made this year. Again, we find the esoteric made entertaining, a fuck-off intellectualism that's compelling and beautiful.

My year was fun and exciting, but there was little, really, to correspond to the virtues found in these bits of art: I don't know how anyone could hope to live like a Peter Blegvad comic or a Charles Gocher lyric. I know how people can live like The Raincoats: That music seems particularly open and personality-driven and free. All these things are types of inspiration.

I believe this was also the year I got really into Amps For Christ, another band where a gentle spirit prevails.

Thurber also championed, in a Comics Comics interview, Donald Barthelme, another favorite this year- I just got The Teachings Of Don B anthology for Christmas. I read Barthelme before this year, of course- George Saunders was talking up "The School" in The Braindead Megaphone, a Christmas gift from two years ago- but I read Forty Stories this year, and while that's not as wide-ranging as Sixty Stories, to some extent it covers a more straight-forward narrative terrain that I appreciate. I realized while paging through some of my favorite Barthelme stories how many of them seem like romantic comedies, of a sort- the comedy coming naturally and the nature of relationships grounding his work in recognizable emotions. The Charlie Kaufman/Michel Gondry collaborations could also be considered romantic comedies, as was pointed out in college, and Dash Shaw has talked about his comics in the context of that genre, rather than the sci-fi designation they most frequently receive.

As has been the case for the past few years, the best band to produce music this year was Big Blood, whose two albums from early this year, Already Gone I and II, are available on the Free Music Archive and I am listening to them now.

I loved Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mister Fox. The move into animation is a great fit for someone with such art-director instincts. By choosing to animate, the whole "films about rich white kids" thing melts away, because that all arose out of a want to build lavish sets rich in detail. The symmetrical shots moves into diorama territory. The director's style meets the animation perfectly, and the story keeps moving from set to set, with the style varying itself accordingly, to show how much it can handle, and it all adds up to something so purely enjoyable to look at.

Some scenes almost move too quickly. The dialogue, equally stylized, moves at a fast clip. You can't really bask in all the detail, all at once. The timing even seems a little off, without human actors to ground it. Partly this stems from how visually sumptuous the screen is at all times. There's a tension between the actor's performances and the animation, where I found all of the voices- so hard to distinguish from each other, compared to most animation. The "look" of the film is such that it sort of deadens character designs, especially considering that long shots are favored so heavily as a way to get in all the detail of the backgrounds.

The dialogue is so fast-moving and stylized that it can't all be parsed, especially while the mind is so taken in with visual detail, which makes it all the more distracting as the mind reels to keep up. Characters say the word "cuss" in place of profanity, which makes sense, but this little gag seems to have made the screenwriters more likely to have the characters fake-swear. It felt to me like the places where the word "fuck" would be the word in question occured here more than the actual word did in Anderson's other films. I could just think that because the use of the word here is so distracting as to be a Godard=level distancing device.

This is the film's great "flaw," if you believe in those. It's not the triumph of traditional craft seen in Up. There's tension between different positive qualities. It's so highly stylized that the styles push up against each other. The delight in cinematic artifice is balanced by this joy in natural beauty, evident in the fur of the characters and the various minerals that make up the backgrounds. It's this "flaw" that makes me want to watch it multiple times, focusing on different elements each time. I think that "too lavish" is an asshole's criticism, frankly. This film really invites asshole criticisms. The "twee/hipster" thing that Anderson's received since The Life Aquatic will come up again and again.

Watching it made me think of Michel Gondry's The Science Of Sleep, which, while live-action, had such a sense of itself visually as for that to be its motivating rationale for being. The "twee" criticism comes from the fact these things base their substance in style. It's the same thing as CGI extravaganzas, for a set of separate values. It's also what makes pretty much any kind of visual art work. It's how comics work, in a lot of ways. These movies are Souther Salazar to James Cameron's Bryan Hitch.

This film is such a triumph. For people who've been on-board with Wes Anderson consistently, this is a reminder that you picked the right team to be on. These are things worth embracing.