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sailorstkwrningIn previous meta installments, I've been reading, or in some cases re-reading, works produced by fairly established writers. Today, in considering the work of author Benjamin Font, I'm venturing into the murkier waters of modern literary fiction. Or . . . kind of literary fiction, and I mean that qualifier for both the "literary" and the "fiction", because Font's genre, if you want to call it that, is fictional autobiography mixed with some . . . magical realism, maybe? I'm a little bit at a loss as to how to describe it, though "vaguely hallucinogenic" comes to mind.
"Fictional autobiography" probably deserves some unpacking. He is not telling a false tale of his own life, but nor is he telling an entirely true one. He admits, in at least one author's note, to instances of comedic exaggeration, and states that the story to follow is "somewhat fictitious", and that the whole thing shouldn't be taken very seriously. But I am left to reflect whether it may be impossible to write the full and complete account of your own life. All memory is warped by time, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill, and it's almost a given that you are, at times, your own innocently unreliable narrator. That said: as best I can tell, he's not James Frey all over again, inserting stories that sound good (as in, shocking) but have no relation to truth. All of it seems possible and probable, and to a certain extent, deeply ordinary. If he was making things up, I suspect he'd make himself either better or worse.
Which is not to say his writing is bad. I began deeply skeptical - you wrote a book which is essentially a transcription of you talking to yourself in the car, by which I mean, you having quasi-apostrophaic conversations with a girlfriend and/or a dog? Really? - and ended feeling a kind of grudging, amused, irritated affection. The works I sampled were at times and by turns fascinating, pretentious, whiny, finely wrought observations, kind of affected and deeply ridiculous, but yet . . . I would read more. He has, somehow, successfully gotten me invested in his self-created soap opera of his own life, which, it is worth noting, may bear only a passing resemblance to his ACTUAL life.
On the subject of his works: his current project is an audiobook [kickstarter; deadline is Jan.1, 2011] which purports to be about a (fictional) cult, The Sons and Daughters of the Earth, though they also seem to exist as a real group, or as a mostly-real group, though under a slightly different name - Children of the Earth. They have a blog , at any rate, which is run by a real person. (Font also has a blog.) I have largely come to the conclusion that it's probably all elaborate performance art. But more on that later.
There is also I Am No One (an imaginary memoir) at Etsy. The work is unbound and in slip case which, bluntly, made me roll my eyes kind of hard, and also think ungenerous thoughts about the probability I'd be finding pages of the stupid thing all over the house, because, hello, UNBOUND MANUSCRIPT. I was nonetheless intrigued by his marketing strategy, shaped around the idea of book-as-object, story-as-thing, and the fact that it IS unbound marks the boundaries of "made by hand" for stories. Not intrigued enough to contend with random pieces of paper all over everywhere, though.
So the works I read were two of his more traditional offerings: The Dogs Come When You're Gone and The Good Life of a Holy Idiot. The former is, as noted above, a very brief transcription of various apostrophic conversations he had with a ladyfriend while driving across the country. As in, it looks like he jammed a recorder in the cupholder and started talking, then transcribed the result, edited it lightly, and called it a book. I think I read it in about an hour and my reaction was "Hmph."
The latter is far longer and meatier work, and covers two intertwining periods of his life, one in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the other in Monterey, California. Parts of it are dense, ponderous, even; other parts are really very funny. Particularly notable from the Monterey section was the descriptions of the share-house, though those those are also kind of grim and awful and sad. I've lived in a share-house, and felt a kind of echoing kinship - an appreciation of familiar chaos and the good times one can have in such arrangements - but also a kind of exhaustion with how romantic he wanted everything to be. Though it was in some of these scenes that his writing becomes the sharpest and the most moving, and the least affected. Also beautiful and sad is the tail-end of the Nebraska section, wherein he writes particularly eloquently about his girlfriend having an abortion, and also a pair of his friends getting married.
Still other parts of it are kind of confusing, not least because everyone in the book calls him Kyle, and he doesn't reveal until the end that that is his actual first name, and "Benjamin Font", his nom de plume, as it were, is itself an adaptation - a partial fictionalization - of himself.
All of that, though, is prelude to the current main event: the audiobook about the Children of the Earth, which, well, I suggest you just watch the Kickstarter video, because there's too many moving parts for me to really sum the concept up accurately. I noted above that I thought the whole thing was elaborate performance art., which is a conclusion I came to by watching the video. And by "elaborate" I mean digital multi-media, including the proposed audiobook, the blogs and whatever videos emerge. (I also thought, oh, he does look like Orlando Bloom, something that got mentioned several times in Holy Idiot.)
Other stray notes - cults, or at least, stories about cults, as a repeating theme, in terms of cultural influences, encompassing this one, and also this (probably) totally different fake cult (Ashtar Command?!) the video for which features music by . . . Z Berg. And then there's Ryan's Q tattoo, which remains a puzzle.
"Fictional autobiography" probably deserves some unpacking. He is not telling a false tale of his own life, but nor is he telling an entirely true one. He admits, in at least one author's note, to instances of comedic exaggeration, and states that the story to follow is "somewhat fictitious", and that the whole thing shouldn't be taken very seriously. But I am left to reflect whether it may be impossible to write the full and complete account of your own life. All memory is warped by time, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill, and it's almost a given that you are, at times, your own innocently unreliable narrator. That said: as best I can tell, he's not James Frey all over again, inserting stories that sound good (as in, shocking) but have no relation to truth. All of it seems possible and probable, and to a certain extent, deeply ordinary. If he was making things up, I suspect he'd make himself either better or worse.
Which is not to say his writing is bad. I began deeply skeptical - you wrote a book which is essentially a transcription of you talking to yourself in the car, by which I mean, you having quasi-apostrophaic conversations with a girlfriend and/or a dog? Really? - and ended feeling a kind of grudging, amused, irritated affection. The works I sampled were at times and by turns fascinating, pretentious, whiny, finely wrought observations, kind of affected and deeply ridiculous, but yet . . . I would read more. He has, somehow, successfully gotten me invested in his self-created soap opera of his own life, which, it is worth noting, may bear only a passing resemblance to his ACTUAL life.
On the subject of his works: his current project is an audiobook [kickstarter; deadline is Jan.1, 2011] which purports to be about a (fictional) cult, The Sons and Daughters of the Earth, though they also seem to exist as a real group, or as a mostly-real group, though under a slightly different name - Children of the Earth. They have a blog , at any rate, which is run by a real person. (Font also has a blog.) I have largely come to the conclusion that it's probably all elaborate performance art. But more on that later.
There is also I Am No One (an imaginary memoir) at Etsy. The work is unbound and in slip case which, bluntly, made me roll my eyes kind of hard, and also think ungenerous thoughts about the probability I'd be finding pages of the stupid thing all over the house, because, hello, UNBOUND MANUSCRIPT. I was nonetheless intrigued by his marketing strategy, shaped around the idea of book-as-object, story-as-thing, and the fact that it IS unbound marks the boundaries of "made by hand" for stories. Not intrigued enough to contend with random pieces of paper all over everywhere, though.
So the works I read were two of his more traditional offerings: The Dogs Come When You're Gone and The Good Life of a Holy Idiot. The former is, as noted above, a very brief transcription of various apostrophic conversations he had with a ladyfriend while driving across the country. As in, it looks like he jammed a recorder in the cupholder and started talking, then transcribed the result, edited it lightly, and called it a book. I think I read it in about an hour and my reaction was "Hmph."
The latter is far longer and meatier work, and covers two intertwining periods of his life, one in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the other in Monterey, California. Parts of it are dense, ponderous, even; other parts are really very funny. Particularly notable from the Monterey section was the descriptions of the share-house, though those those are also kind of grim and awful and sad. I've lived in a share-house, and felt a kind of echoing kinship - an appreciation of familiar chaos and the good times one can have in such arrangements - but also a kind of exhaustion with how romantic he wanted everything to be. Though it was in some of these scenes that his writing becomes the sharpest and the most moving, and the least affected. Also beautiful and sad is the tail-end of the Nebraska section, wherein he writes particularly eloquently about his girlfriend having an abortion, and also a pair of his friends getting married.
Still other parts of it are kind of confusing, not least because everyone in the book calls him Kyle, and he doesn't reveal until the end that that is his actual first name, and "Benjamin Font", his nom de plume, as it were, is itself an adaptation - a partial fictionalization - of himself.
All of that, though, is prelude to the current main event: the audiobook about the Children of the Earth, which, well, I suggest you just watch the Kickstarter video, because there's too many moving parts for me to really sum the concept up accurately. I noted above that I thought the whole thing was elaborate performance art., which is a conclusion I came to by watching the video. And by "elaborate" I mean digital multi-media, including the proposed audiobook, the blogs and whatever videos emerge. (I also thought, oh, he does look like Orlando Bloom, something that got mentioned several times in Holy Idiot.)
Other stray notes - cults, or at least, stories about cults, as a repeating theme, in terms of cultural influences, encompassing this one, and also this (probably) totally different fake cult (Ashtar Command?!) the video for which features music by . . . Z Berg. And then there's Ryan's Q tattoo, which remains a puzzle.
