Once I excerpted the following from a New Yorker article and flagged it in a tweet:
“The Odd Future charge has been led by…Tyler Okonma, known as Tyler, the Creator… Hodgy Beats, a diminutive, quick-tempered rapper,… is half of the duo Mellow-Hype, along with [a] producer who calls himself Left Brain. Two more rappers, Domo Genesis and Mike G, are known… Matt Martians makes spaced-out funk. Travis Bennett, known as Taco, and Jasper Dolphin, are members… Taco’s sister, Syd (the Kyd) Bennett,… Christopher (Lonnie) Breaux, known as Frank Ocean… Tyler and the others sometimes referred to Earl Sweatshirt as Thebe — pronounced “TEH-beh… Before Thebe was Earl Sweatshirt, he called himself Sly, short for Sly Tendencies… One of his friends… was Solomon Allison, who produces hip-hop under the name Loofy….” (Kelefa Sanneh, “Where’s Earl?”, The New Yorker, May 23, 2011)
I followed up with a pastiche which I can’t summon the effrontery to reproduce verbatim. In it my rap persona declares he riffs under the name ‘Pokehole,’ but “when rilly freestylin'” becomes ‘High Plains Vaquero’ and has a “high-fivin’ posse.” He’s ‘Milknickel’ when drafting, and ‘Doctor Skull’ when “the PHuDs get funky.” It doesn’t get better.
By inserting pidgin Spanish into the mix — “ricacho,” “macho muchacho,” “no manches,” “chiste,” “comprendiste” — as well as a smidgin of hackerese — “grok my kludges” — I invited in one swell foop disgust and mockery from at least three constituencies.
Sure enough, another Twitterer sent me an “Oh dear” message: I was getting nasty blowback. Who knew? I had zilch followers. I closed my two-month-old Twitter account and took a powder.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
“What Philip Roth Didn’t Know…”
Dara Horn states that Roth’s caricature of women reveals a lack of empathy, and deems it a literary failure, made more egregious by a lack of curiosity. (“What Philip Roth Didn’t Know About Women Could Fill a Book,” NYTimes)
Definitions of “empathy” mention the words “understand” and “share.”
Is it possible for an author not to understand and share women’s feelings, but still be curious about them?
Does an author write much about anything he or she isn’t curious about?
Can empathy be gender-selective? (That men “get” other men better than they get women is the sitcom pablum of decades. But it doesn’t feel right.)
David Foster Wallace said, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” Maybe his F-word was casual, or maybe he meant to flag coitus and violence as what we’re essentially about.
Does true-seeming imagining of other-sexed people demand some sort of gender dysphoria in the novelist, vicarious or not?
I hazard that the answers could be “Maybe,” “Probably not,” “I doubt it,” and “Possibly.”
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
HJN Female Nude