sure, we all experimented in college

Everyone's getting all worked up about this, and I want to worked up about it, too!

I think what's especially silly about all this is that, as people are pointing out, there actually is lots of really interesting, even experimental writing happening. It's not all on the front display when you walk into Barnes & Noble, but it's happening. The book that first comes to mind is one I've been reading for a review this week: American Genius: A Comedy, by Lynne Tillman. I mean, it's sort of stream-of-consciousness -- I don't know if that counts as "experimental" post 1925 but still -- it's certainly not the "straightforward narratives, believable narrators and happy doodle endings."

It's this amazing and incantatory and neurotic and unceasing tide of imagery, of memory, of observations -- the narrator is obsessed with skin and fabric and animals and history and chairs and all of these things meld together in a revelatory way. Here is a way too long passage to illustrate:

"In Tutankhamen's tomb, there was a linen shirt, which is now housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where I lived briefly during a period when I was also among strangers, though some of them became friends, lovers, or enemies, but I don't know what happened to most of them. I had no cat in London, but in Amsterdam, where I stayed longer, I found a stray, and then found homes for her and her sole surviving kitten when I left for the place I call home. The earliest textiles had pictures of animals on them; there are images of animals being tamed on Byzantine silks of the 6th or 7th century, and they are not sentimental, though today animals on clothes would be considered sentimentl, any animal on a shirt, cup or postcard is some way sentimental, thought everyone loves their animals and their farts. If I were to tell the story of my dog, how she was adopted from a shelter when she was pregnant, how my father disliked her -- my mother demanded we keep her anyway, how he came to love her, because of a special feat she performed, how we found homes for every one of her puppies, if my story included the dog's many exceptional acts, or a description of her tail twirling in gleeful circles as she ran towards me on the grass, it might seem a sentimental story. But I feel worse about the fate of my dog than about anything else in my life over which I had some control, however puny, since most of significant things in life can't be controlled, and about them I had no choice, though in retelling them, I could also be accused of sentimentality, and I expect such accusations. Still, I never wear clothes that have pictures of animals on them."

Good, right? It all comes back. She brings it back. And the form isn't entirely straightforward and traditional because neither is the narrator's mind, see, there is some point in it.

Or maybe I just like that passage because of my dog, and how I worry about her all the time, and how tonight I taught her a new trick.

Well, either way.